Bollywood is an industry that has a value of Rs. 138 billion and is expected to reach Rs.1661 billion by 2017 (FICCI-KPMG report). And if this is not impressive enough, the industry has produced 1.6 billion movies so far which is 4 times the number of Hollywood movies produced till date. Indians have grown up with Bollywood (popular name of Indian Film Industry), watching all the emotions on the screen. One way or another, it has rubbed off on us to an extent that the tickets sold in India are 2.6 billion, nearly twice of that sold in Hollywood.
With a turnover of 2.23 Billion USD and overall marketing spend of roughly 50% per film, the movie business in India is one of the highest spenders in marketing promotion. Considering the size of the industry, it becomes imperative to ask- “Is Marketing being done here the right way? Can we improve the efficiency of spends?”
A decade ago, most of this promotion was straightforward with a limited number of channels to spread the marketing message to a less distracted target audience. With the dawn of the social media and ubiquity of smartphones, reaching an attention deficit audience is now the biggest challenge for production houses and their marketing teams. Which channels to focus on? How to customize the message for each channel? How to allocate spends across channels? These are some of the questions that challenge today’s movie business.
The future is NOW
The last decade has not only seen an increase in the diversity of devices on which entertainment is consumed, but also in the profile of the audience that is now getting used to custom content.
As digital devices adorn new avatars (e.g. wearables) it will become important to understand what type of content is optimal for these devices and how to customize the content as per insights from the audience’s digital profile. Netflix has already started profiling audiences to inform content creation. As the launch campaigns for new movies go omni-channel they will enhance their targeting to incorporate these different data streams to generate a custom genre fit.
At Convergytics, we believe this Future is Now and we have been doing some interesting work in this space. For more information, please reach out to [email protected] OR [email protected].
This article was first published on LinkedIn by Sanjeev Mishra (CEO, Convergytics) and was reposted here with minor modifications.
