Want our viewers to get a refreshed life perspective: Vaishali Sharma

Sony Sab had previously marketed itself as a Hindi-comedy channel.

Now it aims to position itself as a channel that focuses on real emotions and slice-of-life stories. 

With this re-launch, Sony Sab aspires to bolster its brand and content strategy to cement its position as a living room brand. 

For this business intent, conceptualised by an independent creative team, Gopi Putran and Khyati, the channel has rolled out three ad films. These films went live on 3 November 2022. 

View the work here:

Campaign India caught up with Vaishali Sharma, marketing and communications head, Sony Sab, Pal and Sony Max movie cluster to understand the marketing plans for its rebranded identity and the intent behind this revived business proposition. 

What was the intent behind the rebranding?

The revived brand evolution started around three years ago when we moved away from being a comedic-centric channel. During this time, we have worked towards creating different genres and shifting away from comedy. 

Even in regards to the style of our storytelling, we have changed the narrative. Now it is about expressing real emotions. Even though we do have some amount of drama-centric shows, we get to the grassroots level of what our viewers are going through. We are marketing and creating content by giving a lens of hope to the challenges our viewers are going through. 

Our goal is to leave our viewers with a refreshed life perspective. We wanted to encapsulate this brand journey of ours and iterate the new brand vision. 

Thus, we have rolled out three ad films. In the films, we have told stories that aspire to touch the consumer's heart. We want to iterate that the relationship we have with our viewers is based on the small joys we give them through our content. 

What was the insight for the films? 

In today’s complex world, we understand the meaning of using the insights of what relationship means to our viewers, and we have mined an insight which helped us develop this campaign. The objective of the brand campaign is to strengthen our relationship with our consumers and express how the brand interweaves itself into the life and emotions of people. The campaign is one such initiative in the journey of evolution for Sony Sab, and while content continues to make an impact at a brand level, we will continue to engage with people keeping this ethos in mind.

Apart from the films how will you be communicating this rebranded identity?

We will be bullish with marketing on our channel for this rebranded identity. Apart from TV, we aim to have a robust digital presence. 

While our channel has sustained a great range in the cohorts of television audiences, one of the critical aspects is to connect emotionally with audiences digitally across all our platforms and engage with them through conversation. 

A brand journey is never just about one set of commercials. With the brand thought and ethos which we have expressed in these commercials, we would continue to engage with audiences in the space. Be it through show launches or from a place of inciting an emotional connect in digital media. 

On our social media platforms, we are constantly interacting with people. We also aspire to create opportunities for engagement through social media by taking the brand conversation to the heart of the consumer. 

For our recent brand campaign, our split is primarily TV and then digital.

Is any OTT app in the works?

Not yet. We still believe that Indian viewers are dominating the TV space and for the next few years we won’t have to worry about online consumption.

Is BARC ratings the holy grail for brand interest on your channel?

Our brand associates do look at BARC ratings. But a lot of marketers also look at the brand perception in the market of the channels they would like to advertise on. So, while ratings in terms of BARC data use to determine a marketer's media plans, they are also very cognisant about the fact of the environment they would like to be associated with that connects with their brand identity and target audience.