ITV

Tag: KHMC

  • ETV Marathi ups the ante with ‘Zhunj Marathmoli’

    ETV Marathi ups the ante with ‘Zhunj Marathmoli’

    MUMBAI: ETV Marathi is all set to take viewers on a road trip during which 14 celebrities will be assigned cultural tasks to prove their Maharashtrian-ness. Starting 26 May at 9:00 pm, the channel hits the highway with Zhunj Marathmoli that will travel to 12 cities in the state with Shreyas Talpade as host.

    A co-production of Ramesh Deo Productions (RDP) and Logical Thinkers, the 26-episode show has already canned around 14 episodes in seven weeks. Tracking districts across Vidarbha, Konkan, Marathwada, Amravati and Khandesh, Zhunj Marathmoli will see two cultural tasks being executed by the contestants per episode. One participant will be eliminated every week and there will be two or three wild-card entries as well.

    Zhunj took more than six months of ideation while every one-hour episode takes two to three days of shooting and nearly a week of post production. 78 people from RDP are travelling with the participants and Talpade along with four Scarlett Red cameras and six GoPro cams.

    Says RDP producer Abhinay Deo, “In a very simple format, we are trying to show the stories of the 14 participants and Talpade as well as the region where we are shooting through each episode.”

    Comparisons with other shows have already begun but Deo says that once people see the first episode, they will know for themselves. The locations either depict specific cultures or are task or production-friendly. “In season one, we just about cover a third of the state and it will take three seasons for almost full coverage,” says Deo.

    Promotions for the show are taking place in stages. After the first teaser look, the show song was launched on the digital platform. A live Facebook video chat with Talpade has been arranged for next week. The show being youthful, disproportionately higher focus is on digital. Outdoor marketing has for now been fixed in Mumbai while the rest of Maharashtra is on the cards. The creative for the campaign is done in-house and planning executed by Vizeum.

    Budgets for the show, sources say, are approximately Rs 25 lakh to Rs 30 lakh per episode, putting the worth of the whole project at a whopping Rs 6 crore to Rs 8 crore. Ten-second ad slots are being sold for Rs 50,000, which is 30 per cent higher than ETV Marathi’s other flagship programme, Kon Hoeel Marathi Crorepati (KHMC) went for. Lunar footwear has come on board as associate sponsor while the hunt for a title sponsor is on.

    “The Marathi TV space is hugely undervalued. So we are investing in shows to get that up. A show like this couldn’t have been done by us last year but after successfully doing KHMC, we have proved ourselves,” says Viacom18 EVP and ETV Marathi business head Anuj Poddar.

    Talpade has the task of coming up with instant dialogues while the shooting is on. “This show is unlike a studio recorded show. Here, you have to know what exactly your contestants are feeling. For me, that’s my zhunj (fight). Only if someone is getting distracted and we have to get them back on track do I get a pointer or else, it is totally unscripted,” he says.

    For the celebrities Pandaharinath Kamble, Megha Sampat, Swapnil Bhutkar, Arti Solanki, Vikram Gaikwad, Hemlata Bane, Satish Dede, Parag Kanhere, Tyagraj Khandilkar, Deepti Devi, Megha Dhade, Ruchi Savaran, Manisha Kelka and Abhijit Thakur, it boils down to ‘aata mateech tharvel kas’ or ‘the land will decide our worth’.

  • ETV Marathi: Changing the rules of the game : Anuj Poddar EVP Viacom18 and Business Head, Marathi

    ETV Marathi: Changing the rules of the game : Anuj Poddar EVP Viacom18 and Business Head, Marathi

    ETV Marathi has been one of the pioneers in regional entertainment and to our credit, we’ve been visionaries.

    The way I see it there have been three phases of content. The first was the evolution of content. ETV Marathi, when it started out, was not on par with national TV channels but it was locally unique and culturally closer. The next phase was when Star Pravah came into being, and the quality and nature of programming took a leap. The third phase is what ETV Marathi has done since Viacom 18 came into the picture. We’ve taken the current entertainment to its next phase.

    KHMC gets a lot more visibility and helps signify that change at multiple levels such as scale of programming, quality, production values or benchmark impacts the kind of audiences we draw.

    Kon Hoyil Marathi Crorepati (KHMC) was one of the first steps to signify that. The kind of shows we were doing before and after KHMC signify the extent of change in the genre.

    KHMC gets a lot more visibility and helps signify that change at multiple levels such as scale of programming, quality, production values or benchmark impacts the kind of audiences we draw.

    The kind of programming that we have lined up is going to bring in more audiences from outside the genre. These are audiences that were not watching much of our Marathi programming but because of the quality and diversity, they would be looking at it. These are the younger audiences or more contemporary and educated in English or Hindi medium schools and therefore, are not watching regional Marathi entertainment. So it has to be the language and content that has to appeal to them. The content more than the emotional attachment to their language should pull them in.

    ETV Marathi’s legacy is very strong but we were stuck in the past where it pulled in a certain kind of audience. We are now bringing in content that is far more vibrant, younger, contemporary and fresh in order to pull in a whole new segment of audiences to Marathi GEC.

    We had to change our FPC (Fixed Point Chart) but we didn’t have the luxury to create content and wait because it was a running channel. We started replacing shows in a certain priority. We started by replacing some fiction shows. We brought contemporary drama on the channel. We created a completely original show called Vivah Bandhan while another was a remake of the popular show Uttaran called Asawa Sundar Swapnache Bandhan. We thought of taking something that worked nationally and serving it in a regional language with a setting that’s closer home.

    Post that, we worked on the fiction vs. nonfiction mix. Previously, E TV Marathi had nonfiction during a late night time band post 9:30 pm or 10:00 pm, which we pulled to the 9:00 pm to 10:00 pm band. We launched three shows; one was Natya Rang, another was Comedy Expressthat we reworked on and third was another popular ETV Marathi show called Crime Diary that we brought back in a new avatar.

    E TV’s legacy is very strong but we were stuck in the past where it pulled in a certain kind of audience. 

    Traditionally, ETV Marathi was not known for marketing. Now we have changed that and there is cross-channel marketing; outdoor, print, ground activities-pretty much 360 degree. We used KHMC to amplify our marketing because in a GEC space, a channel is never marketed, the show is. We did many on-ground activities for KHMC. We had vans going from city to town and organising a game play on the ‘hot seat’. So people in a small town would gather and get an opportunity to answer five questions and get the feel of it. So we did a lot of these things that may not ultimately give an ROI on a specific show but will help to create a lot of buzz for the channel. KHMC did manage to shake people up as it came as a disrupter.

    Incidentally, KHMC is just about 20 per cent of our ratings while the rest comes from our other shows.

    We’ve not only started doing a lot of marketing but we started just letting people know that ETV Marathi was undergoing a change.

    The consumer would take time to realise a change was happening. After carrying out some changes till March, we launched KHMC in May as our flagship program. That brought us a lot more visibility. What we have noticed is that every new show’s launch has beaten the record of the previous show’s launch. We brought on board better quality and differentiated nonfiction programs this year. The channel now has something for everybody.

    As a channel, for us, it is important to know what is happening in every age group. We track that by age or by SEC. Every single age group is showing growth in reach and time spent on ETV Marathi . We want to make sure that a lot of our old and loyal audiences have reason to stay on the channel as well as the younger audiences come back to the channel because our audiences don’t sit in Mumbai and Pune. So we target the rest of Maharashtra in both ground activities and print.