Diving into the OTT Marketing Pool at #SMLive 2022

In conversation with Social Samosa, Mehul and Rajni from SoCheers, shed light on the evolving landscape of the OTT marketing pool for a plethora of content that includes movies and shows, how to match the entertainment quotient and the ways to leverage the medium for achieving optimum results.

The spectrum of OTT marketing in India has expanded massively over the last four years. As entertainment content across channels vies for the attention of the audiences and their time, Mehul Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO at SoCheers, and Rajni Daswani, Director - Digital Marketing at SoCheers, shed light on how to match the Entertainment Quotient in today’s day and age.

Rajni expressed, “We have been lucky to do a lot of OTT marketing campaigns since 2018. Since then, we have seen the market booming. Marketing campaigns are only getting bigger and better. Every time we see a new campaign, we wonder why didn't we do that. So there is always great competition. There is so much happening, and with entertainment in itself, there is just too much to explore. There is no limit.”

There are 40+ OTT platforms in India right now. There is a humongous amount of content across this OTT. 493+ Hindi shows and movies have been released on OTT Platforms in India in 2022. 

Mehul added, “The challenge right now is that it is a cluttered market. There are so many shows on OTT, and so much content to consume. The question to the end-user is what exactly to watch. Through marketing and all the activities we do, we want to be in the conversations amongst our cohorts so that eventually, the show or the content that we are promoting becomes the talk of the town, and people start sampling our content. That is the end objective of what we tried.”

What can be your differentiator in OTT marketing?

When marketing an OTT show, you need to make sure that you reach the level of word of mouth that the OTT show becomes a conversation over drinks over coffee or something that people are recommending to anyone and everyone. That becomes your differentiator.

Some shows got people talking. They made a mark with their campaigns. It is a combination of great marketing and a good mix of content so that a particular show becomes the talk of the town.

From a marketing point of view, the kind of cohorts you are trying to target and also the action that you want these cohorts to take is very different from how you would market any other product.

How to approach an OTT campaign?

Understand what the show is about, who it talks to (audience-wise), and deep-dive through listening and analytics.

You need to know the content of the show and what sort of cohort will be appealed to by this content. Once you narrow down this identification, you can dive deeper into what the cohort is doing on the internet and get the action points.

Approach the campaign phase-wise and plan the spike moments to reach your target audience. Make a good media mix.

While approaching the campaign phase-wise, you will have to plan the spike moments to reach the audience. For some shows, you might want to do it before the trailer, and for some shows, after the launch. It depends on the nature of the show. You will need a good media mix.

Marketing media mix for any show:

• Offline campaigns
• Pop culture (Memes, Creators, etc.)
• PR and Editorial Collaborations
• Brand Partnerships
• Influencers and Digital Celebrities

Identify your partners and collaborators to maximize the reach to your audience.

You need to plan whether you need to collaborate with certain influencers or multiple other parameters. You will have to start identifying your partners and collaborators.

Listen, plan, execute, act and repeat.

From a creative point of view, you will realize that people are already talking about the content. You will have to start picking up the patterns, and you will understand the next move or the next communication pillar needs to be there.

Once the show is launched, you need to sustain the momentum and fuel it to make sure that you are reaching out to more and more audiences. 

Mehul stated, “The beauty is that we need to do a combination of these media mixes or maybe all of these, completely depending on what the budget is and how we want to take things forward. But how you use each of these is really important.”

“These are the buckets that you definitely want to use. When to use them, how to use them and where to use them is very important”, Rajni added.

In the world of advertising, there are big, small, and beyond. The iconic ones become MEME-ABLE ones, which in turn go viral and pop all over. Talking about one of their OTT Show campaign for The Family Man, they said, "The generation eats, sleeps, and breathes memes. Thus the creation of memes on Family Man began. And that is how the internet started to #MemeTheFamilyMan. It was tricky because memes do not follow a specific narrative or point of reference. This approach was to seed content around the show, which would make the audience level up their meme game. #MemeTheFamilyMan was trending #5 on Twitter on the day of the announcement. 21K+ entries were received from over 8.2K people."

Sharing closing remarks and a piece of advice for marketers, Mehul states, “We will definitely see an increase in the OTT in the years to come.”

Mehul Gupta and Rajni Daswani shared their thoughts at the 6th edition of #SMLive, Social Samosa’s marquee annual conference, organized on World Social Media Day.