Special Chabbis: Break-in news!

Viacom 18's latest production 'Special Chabbis', starring Akshay Kumar, Manoj Bajpai and Anupam Kher, has launched an innovative teaser campaign which takes viewers back to the 1980's style of news reading.

While watching news channels for their evening dose of news, viewers were startled by a teaser that resembled the 1980s Doordarshan-style news reading, with a look-alike of yester-year news reader Salma Sultana telling about a fake CBI team raiding a certain high profile figure's residence.

The innovative promotional teaser campaign was initiated by Viacom18 Motion Pictures for the feature film 'Special Chabbis', slated to be released on February 8, 2013.

Rudrarup Datta, head, marketing and promotions, Viacom18, says, "We wanted to keep the flavour of the film as 'newsy' as possible. In the 1980s, we had no technology available with us and there were limited sources of information/news available, such as daily newspapers or the daily bulletins on Doordarshan."

The four 30-second innovative teasers are part of a larger campaign rolled out by Viacom18 Motion Pictures for four days between December 16 and December 20. More than 200 daily spots have been booked for the teasers on all the top Hindi and English news channels.

As a part of this campaign, a print creative occupied the front page of leading newspapers such as Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran, Hindustan Times City, Mumbai Mirror, Mail Today and others during the same period. The papers carried a news clipping that gave information about the fake CBI raids in different parts of the country, executed by the 26-member con gang.

Talking about the print innovation, Datta says, "We got the insight from the newspapers. Every other day, there is news about crimes, so coming up with a campaign that resembled a news clipping would appeal to readers, we thought."

He says that the ads do not pitch the story to the viewers but instead tell the viewers about the context. The aim is to create a buzz as a film of this size needs to build preferences.

Special Chabbis tells the story of a 26-member con gang portraying themselves as CBI officials, who raided the Opera House in Mumbai on March 19, 1987 and executed a daylight robbery at a jewellery shop. It is a real life story and the culprits left no traces behind them and were never arrested.

Viacom18 Motion Pictures plans to shell out about Rs 7-8 crore for the marketing of the film, which will be done in three phases. While 30 per cent will be spent in the first teaser phase, 40 per cent will be devoted to the second, full blown media campaign phase.

The second phase will commence after the official promo is launched on Friday, December 21. This phase will include more than 500 daily television spots on news, music and general entertainment channels, along with activations on the digital medium. Conversations on the digital media will revolve around the theme of the film and other related social subjects such as black marketing.

In the third phase, Viacom18 will initiate an outdoor campaign to scale up and engage with the audiences. This phase will attract the remaining 30 per cent spends.