360 degrees in cinema

ENTERTAINMENT: Is content losing its crown? The wide-angle view.

Content may be King, but what happens once the 21st-century equivalent of Tom Paine's Common Sense begins to do rounds of the kingdom? If entertainment distribution platforms have been just that bit more reluctant to bend their knees before content, thank (or blame) the buzz around "360 degree marketing".

"Marketing is involved at every stage, right from creating the content to distributing the content, to monetising it," said Sunil Lulla, CEO, Times Global Broadcasting, at the Entertainment, Media & Marketing Forum organised by the Film and Television Producers Guild of India in Mumbai on August 17-18.

Times Now, he added, was launched on Reliance IndiaMobile's R World even before it was available to TV viewers on cable networks. "We reached 9 million viewers before we launched!" exclaimed Lulla. Distribution, thus, is gaining power.

And interactivity-enablers too. The recent rescue drama of 5-year-old Prince, for example, gave news channels an opportunity to engage their viewers in exchanges of goodwill.

Expect more such stories. A dash of controversy does no harm either. According to Uday Singh, managing director, Sony Pictures, "The Da Vinci Code was one such example when controversy became a marketing innovation."

Thanks to the 360-degree efforts, what was a small point of discussion among urban book-readers turned into a mass phenomenon in India (the film grossed Rs 14 crore in India). "Controversy created curiosity," noted Singh.

But marketing films is one thing, using films to market regular brands is another. On this, too, content is turning accommodative: witness the wave of in-film advertising.

Pin it down to synergies. "Large brands are part of our daily lives, and there is greater integration of brands with popular culture," said Sanjay Purohit, director, sales and marketing, Cadbury India.

In-film ads work, most agreed. "Well thought out, strategic placement creates affinity in the consumer's mind," added Pradeep Guha, CEO, Zee Telefilms.

In-film ad placements are worth Rs 35-40 crore in annual transactions already, growing 20 per cent year-on-year, according to industry estimates. Associative advertising (where the product is associated with a film, but does not feature in it) is even bigger, at Rs 100 crore and growing faster (some 50 per cent annually).

This, despite the lack of hard metrics to evaluate the efficacy of these efforts, not to mention the creative risk of not knowing exactly how the brand's association will play out.

Meanwhile, there were whispers of a film script for a Formula-1 racing story seeking brand moolah for almost every scene, scripted shot-to-shot to sell something. Was this the future? Not so soon.

"Barring 8-10 films for which the contribution stands at 5 per cent, in-film placements do not contribute significantly to the cost of film production," said Navin Shah, CEO, P9, a communications agency, "however this can grow to 10-15 per cent, if properly exploited."

So, will content come to cede more power to marketers?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Well-attuned filmmakers, marketers must admit, do have a sovereign feel for the broad market pulse "" and so content with a genuine creative vision has good reason to hold firm. And this is about market intimacy, not monarchic airs.

As Lloyd Mathias, executive director, Motorola, put it, "The benefits have to be properly understood and the costs justified." And this applies to filmmakers as much as advertisers.