Showbiz on the brandwagon

Decades after its launch in the late 1970s, the Rs 804-crore Cadbury India is keen to continue with its Bournvita Quiz Contest (BQC) on TV.

Says Sanjay Purohit, general manager, marketing, Cadbury, "Being a quiz show, it stands for mental stimulation and growth. So does the brand Bournvita."

Bournvita is an exception since few companies care to extend their association with TV shows for more than five years.

All the same, branded shows are growing in favour as an effective way to rise above the clutter and combat the channel surfing that accompanies the commercial breaks.

"The advantage of branded shows is that viewers can't really escape the non-commercial advertising," says Atul Phadnis, director, S-group, TAM.

But does the technique always work? And when can it go wrong?

Judging efficiency is important because compared to a mere title or associate sponsorship or even buying spots on a programme, branded shows are expensive.

While a small-scale show would cost between Rs 1 crore and Rs 3 crore annually, a show on a larger scale would cost four or five times more. So what should companies do to maximise the efficacy of shows on which they showcase their brands?

The first is that associations need to be reviewed regularly. That's because the context of a show can change or become dated so corporations need to constantly synchronise their brand values with the content of the show.

Consider Amul's long-standing sponsorship of branded shows. First, it sponsored Surabhi and later the Amul India show.

With Surabhi, Amul's associations lasted seven or eight years on Doordarshan. The logic at the time was simple. Viewership on weekends used to be 30 to 40 per cent higher than on weekdays in those days and since Doordarshan was the sole channel on air, there was little scope for viewers to surf channels during the commercials. Amul, thus, got to dominate commercial air time.

Importantly, the company gradually influenced the contents of what began as a travelogue-cum-cultural show to get additional mileage, by incorporating food and lifestyle elements.

To promote viewership, Surabhi was prominently advertised on the back of Amul butter packs. A new write-in section and a contest was added. The result: some 70,000 responses per week.

The company used the database to profile customers, track habits and mail Amul recipes to select viewers. FCB-Ulka, the agency that handles the Amul account, claims that the brand achieved ample visibility through the show as well the free commercial time (FCT) at the cost of Rs 2-odd crore annually.

Considering that Doordarshan was still a favoured channel the agency claims to have extracted plenty of value for money. But as satellite channels like Zee and others spread their footprints over the country, Surabhi gradually lost its viewership.

But Amul still needed something to showcase its products in the face of growing competition from multinationals like Britannia and Nestle.

Though Amul had considerable equity in dairy products, its advertising outlays (less than one per cent of sales) were tiny compared to the multinationals.

"The best option was to innovate on media usage to weave a larger- than-life image around the brand," recalls Shashi Sinha, executive director of FCB-Ulka.

The India Show, which shifted to Star Plus from its earlier stint in DD Metro, was one option that was lapped up. Packaged cheese and butter were largely urban-oriented products, and the Amul India Show, which showcased lifestyle and cultural trends and had slick production values, was expected to help the brand shed its country-cousin image.

If Amul leveraged a branded show to counter competition from multinationals, then the Delhi-based pharma company Dr Morepen is using the concept to build its brand of retail stores ahead of the launch.

The recently launched weekly health and lifestyle show, Tango, on Star Plus is the case in point.

Though the company had to invest a substantial chunk of its Rs 10 crore to Rs 12 crore ad budget in the show, the kick-backs were free commercial time on Star channels to air its commercials for its other brands like the revitaliser powder drink, C-Sip.

A media rating agency TAM's AdEx (ad expenditure) study noted that in-programme promotions contributed 33 per cent of the total advertising time on Tango, which compares well with non-TVC advertising on cricket programmes which can be as high as 43 per cent.

How does this tie in with its branded stores? A little history first. Morepen experimented with a new concept in medical retailing by selling its products through five Lifespring stores. This proved a major failure because the concept of branded medical stores has not clicked in India.

Also, Morepen hadn't created awareness around the concept. Executives also say that Lifespring did not really reflect Dr Morepen's brand values. The company's solution is to leverage the show for its own retail chain called Tango.

"The show is an attempt to gain acceptance from consumers for the retail brand," says Bhavna Sood, head, marketing and communications, Dr Morepen.

Of course, it's only possible to maximise the spin-off if the content is relevant to the brand. So, as Amul showed with Surabhi, it may be important for the company to be involved in programme content.

BPL did this to good effect with BPL Oye, which it launched on MTV and later Channel [V] (after STAR snapped links with Viacom Networks which owns MTV), at a cost of Rs 4.2 crore. The provocation for the launch was the impending threat from new multinationals like Sony and National Panasonic.

Says Sanjay Prabhu, vice president, brand management, BPL Mobile, "We wanted to portray a hip and a contemporary brand image so we chose a youth channel."

Importantly, BPL Oye was not bought off-the-shelf; the company was fully involved with the content. One reason was that Philips India was also running a successful countdown show called Philips Top 10 on Zee TV. So BPL Oye needed to be different.

To this end, BPL and Channel [V] hired ORG-MARG (now ACNielsen ORG-MARG) to track popular songs of the week. The company then leveraged the show with promos to bring the viewers to their showrooms.

It launched a contest on Oye called "Access Bollywood", which required the viewer to visit a BPLstore, fill out a form with Bollywood-related questions, mail it to Channel [V] and win a dinner with film stars. Prabhu claims that the contests drove a lot of traffic to BPL showrooms (though he did not disclose the figures).

The company also had an agreement with its franchisees and dealers for the latter to telecast recorded episodes of BPL Oye. Prabhu claims that this helped the company get feedback from the trade and thereby benchmark the success of the show.

A few episodes of the show were also sold in the Gulf when dealers there informed the company about the popularity of the show. Prabhu recalls a definite increase in sales from West Asia as result.

With Oye, BPL also sought to constantly build excitement "" another pre-requisite if branded shows are to maintain their viewership. For instance, several episodes were shot in Indian colleges.

Hindustan Lever did the same with its Close-Up Antakshari's. Lever started sponsoring Antakshari competitions across colleges in various cities and also incorporated college-special episodes.

This created so much of brand connect that even though the show is now sponsored by Sansui, many viewers still relate Close-Up with the show.

Cadbury's is similarly hyperactive when its comes to the BQC. From July 2000 onwards, for instance, Cadbury organised intra-school events across 4,000 schools in 60-odd cities in West Asia and Nepal.

Later BQC school connect programmes, which aim at driving nutrition awareness, were launched in schools in about 20 cities that are "priority" markets. The company claims that the programme has taken BQC to 15 crore children.

To tackle the boredom that inevitably sets in, Cadbury changed the format by shooting episodes in outdoor locations like Sri Lanka and Kerala.

Also to push the Bournvita's new confidence proposition, a new "confidence challenge round" was included in the contest. The company claims that the fresh format helped TRPs increase from 0.5 to 1.5 per cent.

In short, a brand's association with a show must have a logical connection. Take the case of two-wheeler maker TVS, which sponsored a music talent show "" Sa Re Ga Ma on Zee TV in the late nineties.

Though company executives claim to have discontinued the association because the fatigue factor set in after three-and-a-half years, media analysts claim that the association of the two-wheeler brand with the show were not tuned to perfection.

Nevertheless the show was a hit, partly because of its compere, Hindi playback singer Sonu Nigam and the recall for the show was quite high.

This became a problem when competitor Hero Honda took up the show since many viewers continued to associate it with TVS.

Also, the original anchor is no longer with the show which has eroded it of some of its charm (imagine a relaunch of Kaun Banega Crorepati without Amitabh Bachchan). The obvious risk is that Hero Honda will end-up looking like a me-too.

If being the second association with a popular show can be a bad idea, a choice of the inappropriate channel to brand your show can also backfire. Analysts point to a danger zone in the case of Whirlpool.

The consumer durables maker, chose to brand a time slot on Discovery channel called the Whirlpool Woman's Hour on weekdays, which has been on air since April 2002. Media watchers say that Discovery is not a women-oriented channel.

The rationale for the choice seems to have come from its previous debacle with its homemaker-oriented game show on mainstream channel, Zee TV Whirlpool Mera Home Mera Magic. The show was withdrawn after poor response, both in terms of TRPs and audience interest.

The problem was partly diagnosed as cultural "" the Whirlpool woman was supposed to urbane, sophisticated and well-informed. That is why the company turned its attention to an upmarket but niche channel like Discovery.

Says Gurpreet Singh, media controller, Lodestar Media (the agency for Whirlpool), "We preferred to make the association on Discovery stronger and more impactful for Whirlpool by not just branding the slot but also by making the channel launch a programme promo exclusively with our brand protagonist "" Amrita Saluja."

Is the programme drawing in the viewers among its core audience? The media agency declines to give numbers but claims that the client has given them positive feedback.

Overall, the bigger challenge for marketers who sign in for branded shows is to evaluate the response, because TRPs can be misleading. This is because media-owners are reluctant to part the branding opportunity of a best-seller.

Says Apurva Purohit, president, Zee TV, "If the channel lets a brand sponsor a high-TRP show, it would lose out on revenue from potential associate sponsorship and the remaining commercial time on the show."

That is why brand associations tend to be with a dance, music, game or quiz show or a even movie series but almost never with even a moderately popular soap series.

The lesson for marketers is that your show might have low TRP s, but it can still connect with your core consumers and be extensively viewed in the target group.

In that case, the longer the association with the show, the higher will be the recall. Says Sinha of FCB-Ulka, "TRPs do matter after a given point. In Surabhi's case, TRPs were never higher than 3 or 4 per cent. But we decided to look beyond TRPs and consider the overwhelming response it got through letters and continued the association."

Adds Kacon Sethi, media observer, "A brand association with a show is lost unless it runs over a long period of time, even if there is a perfect brand fit."Whoever said show business was going to be easy?

(Additional reporting: Amit Ranjan Rai)