Pepsi MTV Indies: Road Less Travelled

The newly-launched channel from Viacom 18, MTV Indies has launched a marketing campaign titled Step Up, Discover.

Everyone wants to take a break from the routine. It gives people something to learn while giving them the opportunity to explore more about themselves. To achieve this, people have started taking long vacations, gone soul searching in the mountains, biking, adventure and sports.

Taking the concept forward, Pepsi MTV Indies, the new channel from Viacom 18 is working towards enabling people to learn more about independent artistes - in the Indie genre - who are different and away from the mainstream.

To get the message to viewers, it has unleashed a marketing campaign titled Step Up, Discover with four creatively designed videos punning about four different genres of content including news, daily soaps, reality shows and Bollywood item numbers.

Well-directed

The videos urge people to step up and discover the indie content the channel has. It uses a 'skip ad' button to allow viewers to jump to the Indie content from the four situations mentioned. Says Sumeli Chatterjee, head, marketing and insights, MTV and Pepsi MTV Indies, "We are talking about a whole new world, which is not out there (referred to as the underworld in the videos), in the open. We want to bring them to the forefront."

The music for the campaign has been composed by Rakshit Tiwari, lyrics by Vishesh and it is produced by VeryBusyPeople production house. The videos will also be shown across MTV, Pepsi MTV Indies and other network channels. An out-of-home activation campaign will also begin soon, and will focus on colleges to get to the target audience, which is mainly between the ages of 18 and 35.

The entire campaign will, however, be spearheaded by digital activation. People will be targeted while they look for a specific type of content and then will be fed with the communication of that type from the channel.

For example, while people search for news about the budget, they will be fed with a video on debates. Explains Chatterjee, "We are targeting the consumer and the occasion of the content consumption. It is a very genre-aligned campaign because each of the creative is related to some genre."

Spreading the news

In the last few months, the channel has conducted multiple onground activation and associations across cities. It is also giving content for a radio show on Radio One for seven markets including Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, Ahmedabad and Chennai.

The Facebook page of the Pepsi MTV Indies has over 3.3 lakh fans and it has over 18,000 followers on Twitter. The channel proudly claims to be one of the first movers in the genre as more and more brands are attempting to associate with such content. With 70-80 per cent of the content composition, the Hindi-English mix dominates. The rest of it is regional where the music sessions are followed by comedies.

The channel also plays content created by Indie artistes after a rigorous selection process helped by a team of experts at the channel. Artistes can share their content with Pepsi MTV Indies. Selecion, claims the channel, is based on merit and talent, not on the auditions.

MTV Indies is set to launch five shows in the next two months and claims to reach more than 20 million homes. MTV will have more mainstream music content and Indies will have more sub-culture music content. There are quite a few firsts that MTV Indies has. It doesn't work by the regular episodic format, but plays around with variable duration content. Its app (Pepsi MTV Indies) has been downloaded over 10,000 times. This is the first time that a channel has been sponsored by a brand. Pepsi also unveiled its new product packaging with the global logo and visual identity alongside the launch of the channel.