Disney Star Network executes 24-hour roadblock for Tata Sky’s rebranding to Tata Play

Shekhar Banerjee, Chief Client Officer & Head - West, Wavemaker India, shares how they executed the campaign across 54 channels of the network.

Disney Star network executed a 24-hour roadblock for Tata Sky to drive awareness for their recent rebranding campaign as Tata Play. The brand’s transformation into a content distribution company was communicated in eight languages on 54 channels across its movies, entertainment, music, kids and infotainment and lifestyle channels. Between 6 pm on January 27 – 6 pm on January 28 these channels showed only Tata Play ads.

“Disney Star is thrilled to associate with Tata Sky at a critical juncture in their 18-year journey, as they rebrand themselves as Tata Play. This 24-hour network roadblock across all the entertainment channels of Disney Star demonstrates the strength of our network and the pivotal role it can play to support brands in their business transformation efforts. Our entertainment network’s rich experience and unparalleled reach of 700 million monthly unique viewers makes us the platform of choice for advertisers to derive the maximum investment value,” said Kevin Vaz, head - Network Entertainment Channels, Disney Star.

During these 24 hours, 21 creatives played on the Hindi channels (featuring Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor Khan) and it was also dubbed into Bengali and Marathi. Another 20 creatives (featuring Madhavan and Priyamani) played in Tamil, which were dubbed into Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

Shekhar Banerjee

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The campaign was executed through Tata Play's media planning agency Wavemaker India. In a conversation with afaqs!, Shekhar Banerjee, Chief Client Officer & Head - West, Wavemaker, said, “At Wavemaker, we have been instrumental in the rebranding journey of some marquee key brands in India. We understand the importance of the launch day and the initial week of the rebranding. So we have set very strong, aggressive goals about the new brand’s awareness in week one. When we’re doing such a high scale, important brand transition, nothing comes close to TV as a medium. It is still the largest medium with around 900 million audiences in the country. And there cannot be a better steroid than the largest network to reach this audience. In one day you can achieve what you cannot in a month.”

To further scale up the roadblock and deliver maximum impact, the network also executed 1,800+ Aston bands, 1450+ bugs, strategic in-show integrations in top shows across seven languages, 30+ creatives with their top talent and more.

The objective of the roadblock was to get the fact registered that Tata Sky is now Tata Play. The frequency of the ads with a very high reach enabled that. But watching the advertisement of one brand for 24 hours across 54 channels can be quite jarring for the audience. That is where having 21 creatives in Hindi and 20 in the southern languages brought the balance.

Banerjee says Wavemaker’s past learnings from working on such campaigns also helped and they guided the client and the agency. “Our creative partners Ogilvy have worked with us in the past for similar launches and know the drill. We made sure there's enough content and space, so that it doesn't become jarring but at the same time, it allows us to get our messaging out clearly,” he added.

Tata Play took a bold call by going for a roadblock as the reach and frequency can be built over a period of time at a much lower cost as well. “But it's a trade-off between the consumer knowing from day 0 that the brand has changed or doing a slow build up. Research proves that the faster a new brand is built the better it is for the health of the business,” Banerjee shared.

“The 24- hour roadblock on the Disney Star network has helped create massive awareness across India, of Tata Play and its offerings right on Day 1 of the launch. Disney Star teams across various channels worked closely with the Tata Play team and amplified the message through their well-known characters, and created many other value-adds which added further ammunition to the execution,” said Harit Nagpal, MD and CEO, Tata Play. “It was an absolute delight to work with Disney Star network who brought all their resources together to provide a seamless execution for this brand transformation campaign,” he added.

The biggest challenge in executing the roadblock was managing the entire network with the large number of creatives that were being rolled out. “Most of the material and creatives could not be sent to the broadcaster early. As it is a brand transition, we had to follow strict guidelines and we were working on tight schedules. So everything had to be scheduled on short notice,” he concluded.

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