Zee Café’s Desperate Housewives Campaign Says Sin is In

Desperate Housewives has been a much watched show on Zee Café and the concept itself has been quite disruptive for the Indian society. Interestingly there are quite a few viewers in the target audience. The new season has been launched by Zee Café and since most of the target audience is active across social media platform, it makes sense to reach out to them with promos via this platform rather than the usual / regular traditional media.

Objective:

Promoting the new season of Desperate Housewives on Zee Café – Seasons 1-8 using the tag line ‘Sin is In’. Desperate housewives has been playing on other channels quite successfully. The promotion is to veer these audiences towards Zee Café and to interest existing fans of Zee Café.

Execution:

The channel did the usual vanilla social media promos – tweeted, created videos for youtube, promoted the show on Facebook.

What is interesting is their website, created especially for the launch of the show asked viewers to find out their ‘Sin Score’ enticing them to enter a sinful world. The sinful world is an elaborate take on the 4 main characters of the first few seasons of Desperate Housewives. Playing on the personalities of the four protagonists of Desperate Housewives, Zee Cafe created a sinful quiz to identify what sort of a temptress the quiz taker is!

What was even interesting is that you could also win passes to a sinful night out sponsored by Bebe. The first 100 girls would win passes. You could also select sinful reads which has blog posts and you can view the Desperate Housewives promo videos on their website.

Apart from that their twitter id has some interesting contests on twitter which again redirects fans to the website.

Positives:

• A very tastefully done website is definitely a win for the show. The website has some engaging content high on interactivity, making a first time visitor of the website curious enough to keep checking the tabs and trying out what happens next. Throughout its communication on social media, Zee Cafe has carefully targeted an audience that can relate to the sinful characters portrayed on the Desperate Housewives show, by creating relevant content to grab attention of its audience across platforms.
• Also the fact that Zee Cafe arranged for a sinful night out sponsored by Bebe was a great idea to involve fans real time, by giving them an exclusive experience of an – ‘Only Girls Party’! Definitely an initiative to build loyal fans of the show.

Areas for improvement:

• Some more interactivity across social media platforms that could make the fan linger a lot more would have helped. By creating a hashtag #SinIsIn, and getting fans to talk about the concept of the show using the hash tag would have helped further to get visibility. Zee café very successfully created the #CantWaitForTheOriginals to launch the show. It’s a wonder that they did not think of this for Desperate Housewives. Also it might have helped if there were a few ‘sinful’ contests on Twitter. It is easy to talk about your sins on twitter in 140 characters.
• Also, sharing candid pictures and best moments post the Girls Sinful Night Outcross social media platforms, could have worked in their favor, in order to showcase the sin quotient at the party, something that the chosen few were a part of.

Conclusion:

Over all a great thought has gone into the campaign, which probably started off with a wonderful idea and it appeared to fizzle out as the show started going on air. There is still a lot of potential for the website created to keep fans engagaed throughout the season, with an interesting property to promote the show by interacting with fans. Currently it works at a basic level, by displaying show-timings. Here’s hoping that the team promoting Desperate Housewives revisits the website and the social space to its full potential.