India largely watches movies on TV, which makes it a consistent part of media plans to build frequency: Ajay Dang

In a new series of interviews with marketers and media leaders, we discuss “Bollywood & Brands”, covering all things related to marketing, media, and especially films.

 Stree 2 has been creating waves at the box office with record-breaking collections of over Rs 500 crore. The TV premiere of this movie is likely to be highly anticipated by audiences who haven’t been able to catch it in theatres. It is just one among the slew of releases that came out in the last couple of months to broadly favourable reviews and footfall.

Movies like Pathaan, Gadar 2, Animal, Salaar, and Fighter have had great runs, achieving sensational numbers in both cinemas and on TV. Some recent releases such as Kalki 2898 AD and currently running Stree 2 have seen record-breaking collections at the box office, setting up high anticipation for their TV premieres.

It is therefore pertinent to discuss the place and importance of Hindi films in a brand’s media plans. Ajay Dang, president and head - marketing at Ultratech Cement, explains how he and other brand leaders can leverage movie channels in their media mix and what factors to weigh when allocating money to film channels.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

Leveraging movies for brand building

Purely from an audience point of view, there’s something very interesting about movies. In-theatre movie-watching actually attracts a fairly small number of viewers as compared to the overall viewership of movies in this country, by and large, the country’s viewership of movies is through television and streaming platforms. 

From a content genre perspective, it's a very steady cushion in the overall viewership. If there is no large event that’s on the horizon, and one is looking for non-agenda viewership, movies come into play. And therefore, movies are part of regular media plans to build a reasonable amount of frequency — because this is a medium where people stick around for a while. 

There is also the factor of shared family viewership. Movies offer long viewing durations, which aids in frequency building from a media planning perspective. At the right cost, movie premieres provide reasonable opportunities for brands. Further, even reruns build a reasonable amount of frequency.

Role of TV in building brand awareness

(A Kantar cross media study in India from 2012 to 2023 of about 125 case studies found that a third of impact building of brand awareness comes from TV.) 

That number is possibly an underestimate. There are generally three types of advertising: long-term, short-term, and consumer harvesting. I think digital largely does the harvesting job slightly better. 

But given the attention span on digital platforms, establishing equity is a difficult task. Studies by marketing experts Peter Field and Karen Nelson indicate that nearly 89% of digital creatives fail to capture the two and a half seconds of attention needed to embed something into permanent memory. Ultimately, the goal is to build brands.

In a sense, TV is an invaluable medium for building mental availability, especially for brands with longer cycles. Digital, on the other hand, builds incremental reach.

Ideal media-mix

While this depends upon the category buying behaviour for a brand, most experts talk about putting nearly 60% plus media spend on long term brand building, and the great thing about long term brand building is it does short term building too. 

So, if you are disciplined enough and plan strategically, you would spend far more money towards the long-term play. Of course, harvesting is also needed. There are audiences which are TV lean, there is reach that you can build up on digital, or there could be TV dark markets to reach, so for those markets you need digital.