Gaming helps the character come out of the television screen and into the kids' life: Nina Elavia Jaipuria

Nickelodeon recently announced two IPs - ‘Abhimanyu Ki Alien Family' and 'Kanha - Morpankh Samrat'. 

Campaign India spoke with Nina Elavia Jaipuria, head, Hindi - mass entertainment and kids tv network, Viacom18, on the marketing strategies of the IPs, how it intends to reach out to viewers in a heightened digital ecosystem, and brands that are showing interest in the channel. 

Edited excerpts: 

How will the show launches strengthen Nickelodeon's content play and overall viewership? 

Over the years, we have aimed to build characters that tell our stories differently through an array of genres. 

This time around, we wanted to play around with the children's curiosity. We realised that kids are intrigued about aliens and ET (Extra-Terrestrial) and so we conceptualised these shows.

Our goal is to tell stories that intrigue and entertain kids. We want to entice our viewers and get them into this comfort zone and make them connect with the characters of the show.

The intent of rolling out Kanha is due to the whitespace in the animated mythology genre. The way animation can contribute to storytelling is way different from real-life action tells a story. 

With these IPs, we want to fortify our content franchise and fill in the missing whitespaces. We want to be a well-rounded, storytelling and content-creating platform, hence launching these shows was potent. 

This endeavour will consolidate our viewership, get more kids to our channel and make sure we continue to retain our TV poll position. 

We wanted to launch these IPs during the summer vacation because viewership surges amongst kids. The timing is a great opportunity to create awareness about a new show and generate eyeballs. 

How are you going to promote the two new shows? 

We want to engage with kids at all touchpoints for these IPs. 

But the biggest challenge for the kid’s category is that they are not avid consumers of print and radio. That is why beyond promoting ourselves on our kids' channels which are Nickelodeon and Sonic, we will advertise on channels and genres that kids are on. In a family, everyone watches TV together, hence we will be promoting the shows on other network GEC's and movie channels. With this, we want to capture eyeballs such as gatekeepers that are not present in the kid's genre.

We want to make sure that we are leaving no stone unturned and are having a full-360-degree approach for these IPs. Hence, we will be also promoting the shows on connected TVs through JioTV Plus, DTH, and cable. 

In the summer, it is a no-brainer that footfalls in malls and cinema halls will increase, hence we will be present through ambient advertising in these indoor touchpoints. 

In cinema halls, we have done an innovation, where the characters of Abhimanyu Ki Alien Family will be placed as cardboard cutouts. 

For smaller towns, through OOH touchpoints, we will be having van activations and strive to build engagement with newer audiences. 

Beyond that, we are aware that kids are present on different screens and are heavy consumers of social media. Every time we created a dance challenge, kids participated. They are intrigued by the dance steps and want to replicate them. So for these IPs, we have created a dance challenge for social media so that kids can interact and get accustomed to the show. We will then post these challenge videos as reels on our social media platforms. 

The other marketing piece that we have thought about is gaming. We have created ‘Run Abhimanyu, Run’ which will be available on our website and mobile devices. The beauty of these gaming touchpoints is engagement. It is important to engage, and gaming provides that opportunity. Gaming creates an avenue for the character to come out of the television screen and into the kids' life.  

How is Nickelodeon staying ahead of the game in the kids' GEC space? 

We need to understand how to keep our viewers engaged. Our core brand value is to entertain children by creating a content library to help us to consolidate our relationship with the child. 

It is not about creating characters but telling new stories and being relatable to our target audience. 

Currently, which category of brands are highly investing in the kids' GEC space? Could you name some of the new brands that have partnered with Nickelodeon and Sonic?

We have brands like Kellogg’s and Perffeti advertising with us regularly. We also have clients that are not kid-centric advertisers such as Colgate, Godrej Consumer Products, and Reckitt, investing in the channels.

Different clients engage with us differently depending on their need for their brand. New advertisers have also come on board this year, like H&M, MTR Foods, Wakefit, Apollo Pharmacy, and Havmor.