 "Piyush Sharma, Chief operating officer, India APAC, Zee Living")
Fact-based entertainment is a segment that has to grow 10 times in India to reach international levels, Piyush Sharma tells Ritwik Sharma.
What are the growth opportunities for a channel like Living Foodz and how well addressed is the food, travel and leisure category in India?
Over the last one year and about 65 weeks of its existence, as far as audience reach is concerned Living Foodz has remained the undisputed leader in the category of lifestyle under the broad umbrella of factual entertainment in the television space. Factual entertainment, lifestyle or infotainment are highly underleveraged and underpenetrated in India. This is a segment, which has to grow 10 times of the current share of voices in the overall pie to reach international levels. Therefore, we are very gung-ho and optimistic about the future. We believe we are very well placed where even after coming in as a new entrant we have beaten players who have been there for five-six years to secure an unassailable leadership position. This is both in terms of BARC ratings for the general universe, where we control close to 40 per cent market share as a single player, and BARC special ratings, which is the Alpha Club where we have close to 50 per cent market share.
How critical is the interplay of media such as TV, web and subscription based video -on-demand as the opportunity grows in the factual entertainment category?
We believe that growth opportunities for everyone in India today lie in the ability to look at a brand-centric multi-channel model. The basic business that you are in is to create the right content for the right audiences, and to be able to monetise the opportunity. To that extent, we are making huge investments in content. We believe that our content strategy is to use once and rule out everywhere. Even at the time of conceptualising and commissioning of the content we take care of the fact that the content we are releasing may have to be rolled out on medium A, B and C. So, it’s not as if we produce content for television, try and force fit it from a one-size-fits-all approach to a digital medium. Only recently we launched our website, livingfoodz.com. It is the fastest growing food website in the country; we are close to clocking 100,000 and are aggressively aiming for a one million number in a month’s time. Livingfoodz.com is not a replica of what is being offered on television. It is an independent standalone initiative that goes beyond all the television content. Our objective is to aggregate, engage and monetise the largest food enthusiast community to begin with in India and subsequently in the world.
Do you see the creation of different content for different medium as essential for success?
We clearly understand that there are two kinds of audiences we are reaching out to. One is a recipe seeking audience, which is being catered to by shows where you have stand and stir studio programming, instructional content. For the other audience, there are cutting-edge programmes outside the studio and includes food plus travel, food plus beauty, food plus fashion, food plus art, etc. So Ganga, one of our most prestigious projects earlier this year which received overwhelming response, was a tribute to the food along the Ganges. We are looking at creating various kinds of clutter-breaking content.
How should a pan-India channel that aims to cater to audiences with diverse food cultures look at content?
The ability to fine-tune content through a medium to meet audience tastes helps to meet such a challenge. TV is a one-to-many kind of communication, so what you need to be catering to is a bell curve where you are required to introduce content in areas which are seen to be of mass consumption. So we have a section on northern flavours. When we bring in Bollywood we know that it cuts across geographies. But with digital, we know we are talking to a far more discerning audience and we are in a position to undertake a one-to-one or a one-to-group communication and fine-tune the content to suit specific needs. I think technology today complements the media and enables one to walk through such challenges easily.
What are the broad challenges for channels operating in this space?
It is a business of content. So to be able to continuously invest in fresh content, produce content that is liked by audiences and have a pulse on the changing needs of a changing India is on the one hand the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity on the other.
