Sony Pix has kickstarted the year with a new initiative that marketing head Himmat Butalia says could be counted as, "Aggressive, definitely, but also innovative."
Called 'Big Break', the initiative offers Hollywood fans a chance to appear in promos on Pix, and an appearance on shows on Sony Entertainment Television and SAB. The means to this end is a contest, where people will have to upload a one-minute video of themselves enacting a scene from a Hollywood movie. Pix has created a micro-site to aid the process of entering the contest and for people to acquire further details about the campaign. A ‘Big Break’ application has also been created on Facebook.
Watch the call for entries promo
Explaining the purpose of the contest, Butalia said, "The reason why we keep on doing these initiatives is because we want to build a brand. There are so many English movie channels today; the numbers game will keep on going on. Apart from that, the brand recall and what people think about the brand are very important as well. With English channels, the fact is that people flip, and youngsters have more choice today. 'Big Break' is a brand building exercise to connect with the consumer so that when he thinks about movies and Hollywood, Pix is in his mindset. If 500 people enter, maybe 50 per cent of them who aren't watching Pix will start testing it."
Talking about the target group for the contest, he said, "For an age limit, it starts from 15 and above. But I suspect the majority of the entries will come from the 16-30 age bracket - youngsters will want to do it because of the excitement of enacting a one-minute scene, and they can share it on Facebook." The seven metros - Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, are where Butalia expects entries to come from. The campaign to promote the contest will be 360-degree - outdoor, radio, print, digital, on-ground (including promotions in colleges in the metros), and television (additional spots have been bought on MTV and UTV Bindass).
Questioned about marketing spend for 'Big Break', Butalia said, "It isn't about 'significant spend', but about doing doings intelligently. We've done the ground research and figured out the pockets and colleges we want to go to."
We also asked Sunder Aaron, executive vice president and business head, Pix, about the English movie space in the country, and how Pix is doing. "It's doing well," he said. "It's a very competitive segment now. Last year, our goal was to surpass HBO, which we did for about 80-90 per cent of the year. We still have a lot of ground to cover. With digitisation coming up, it's going to be very challenging to ensure that viewers, when they have a chance to subscribe and select, feel that Pix is important in their homes."
Asked whether the genre is still "niche", he said, "It isn't 'niche', it's more of a 'minority', numbers-wise. It's a necessity for the majority of television households around the country to have English channels. Maybe they don't consume them all the time, but the channels aren't really 'niche' in that respect."
