MUMBAI: With an aim to provide humour and unpredictable content that appeals to the urban audience, Big Magic is coming up with two new male centric shows targeting young adults within the age group of 15 – 30. The first show is called Boyz, which recently went on air, whereas the other show – Pyar Marriage Shhhh (PMS) will begin airing from 7 September.
Reliance Broadcast Network COO Ashwin Padmanabhan said, “We have successfully created a position of our channel in the comedy space. Our new programming content is based in an urban kind of setting.”
What’s more, Big Magic is also planning to launch another three to four shows and short formats in the coming months. “We are working on a talk show format, which is likely to launch in the next three months. We are also getting multiple short formats like Chutki and Shopkeeper, which has become very big already. We have introduced another short format called Mania Ki Dunia. The short-format YouTube content, which already has 20 million views, will also be put on radio, television and online. As we started building comedy as a genre, our effort is to create relevance of this genre across multiple platforms,” he added.
Elaborating the story of new shows, Padmanabhan said, “The theme of Boyz is about three college friends and their crazy experiences of coming out of their comfort zone and discovering life. So it’s a typical college story but like every other boy, they carry the fantasy of not just the perfect job but also the girl of their dreams. Each character is sketched extremely sharply and differently. The show will fill in the gap of urban TV viewing male audience with an edginess that has hitherto been unavailable on television.”
The theme of Boyz captures the target audience who are in a similar phase and hence the youth can relate to it. “This high octane comedy is another innovation in Big Magic’s attempt at strengthening its new positioning in providing edgy and contemporary content,” Padmanabhan added.
Speaking about Pyar Marriage Sshh, Padmanabhan said, “The show has a very interesting plot about three friends and revolves around the crazy things that happens to them. These guys are neighbours who come together and become friends. Every episode shows something new happening in their life.”
Being the only channel that focuses solely on the comedy genre, Big Magic has a clear cut vision to make young India laugh out loud and the programming strategy is based around the same philosophy.
The channel will now also venture into the episodic format. Speaking on the same, Padmanabhan informed, “The story starts and ends with the episodes. It’s just like F.R.I.E.N.D.S wherein every episode is new and different in its own way. A story will not carry forward into the next episode. It’s the kind of content that works with the current generation.”
Following the international format, Boyz will have multiple seasons and each season will have a run period of six months. Following the format, Big Magic has already re-launched Hazir Jawab Birbal, which was earlier named as Akbar Birbal.
Addressing the need gap for male centric entertainment shows, Big Magic took the humour approach to attract its TG. Padmanabhan added, “There’s not much good content available for men on television and that’s why men tend to consume more news or sports. Humour has a wide appeal so, if we present a story from a man’s perspective, the kind of humour gets integrated across the audience.”
Big Magic will be promoting the shows across platform. “Digital is a very key component of marketing strategy. Apart from that, we are also using television channels that are targeting young adults like MTV and Bindass as well as news channels. Along with promotions, we are also doing a whole lot of integration. Funny portions of the content is cut and tweaked for radio. RJs from our networks as well as partner networks are supporting this campaign. In radio, apart from the in-house Big FM, we have also roped in Fever 104 and Red FM as partners,” he informed.
The marketing initiative will cut across major cities like Ahmedabad, Pune, Chandigarh, Delhi, Mumbai, Kanpur, Lucknow, Baroda and Surat.
The campaign has been developed by Grey Worldwide, whereas MEC is the media buying agency. The digital campaigns are being handled by Resultrix Media.
Throwing light on the research that was done before launching the shows, Padmanabhan said, “From the show perspective, we do a pilot testing, which has been done across some centres in Mumbai, Delhi and other metro cities. On the basis of that, we received good feedback. We are not only testing the shows but are also testing the promos online.”
There was a pre-launch campaign rolled out for Boyz where people were asked to give their feedback on the promos that were uploaded on YouTube.
