The Campaign

Brands are still hesitant towards sponsoring web exclusive fiction series in India as it was not done by any other brand in India before. Saturday Night, Alright! was India’s first branded web exclusive fiction series. The show content was designed to influence discussion on social media. Alcohol brands in India are not allowed to advertise or sponsor branded content, hence the use of Mcdowell's Soda. Content with alcohol consumption in it needs to be age restricted to 25 years and above.

Results

The brand McDowell’s No.1 stands for ‘Dosti (Friendship) Ka No.1 Spirit’. Our objective was to reach young adults online with relevant, appealing content around the brand message of friendship and celebration. A long standing culture amongst the target audience is that of celebrating Saturday nights. It’s the time of the week when young urban adults get together with friends to party. Capturing this less explored cultural phenomenon, MTV created India’s first branded web exclusive fiction series SATURDAY NIGHT, ALRIGHT! The 12 part series depicts what people do on a Saturday night through the story of 4 friends. Each 10 minute episode captured the banter and conversations between the friends over a course of a Saturday night. Each episode was centered on a topic of interest to the target audience like relationships, bosses, marriage, social media, cricket and sex and were titled accordingly. The topic of the week’s episode extended into discussions, content posts and activities on social media platforms. This generated a lot of interest in the episode content leading viewers to watch the episodes on the show website and on YouTube. Each episode release was accompanied by a week long campaign on social media that consisted of topical discussions and hilarious images that struck a chord with the audience leading them to share the content and watch the episodes. We shared funny images, polls and a test to find out if your boss is a douchebag! On twitter, we got followers to help us compile a list of the worst things bosses do. There was a surprise prize for the most hilarious tweet with #SNA. For 12 weeks we had our social media followers engaged with similar conversations and content on a variety of episode based topics.

Saturday Night, Alright! was targeted at young urban Indians. The target group showed an increasing trend in video content consumption online. Each episode was centered on a topic of interest to the target audience like relationships, bosses, marriage, social media, cricket & sex. The topic of the week’s episode extended into discussions, content posts and activities on social media platforms. Each episode release was accompanied by a week long campaign on social media that consisted of topical discussions and hilarious images that struck a chord with the audience leading them to share the content and watch the episodes.

Episodes videos restricted to the 25+ audience clocked more than 750,000 views across YouTube and sites. The Saturday Night, Alright! soundtrack was downloaded by more than 4,500 users. The campaign around the show achieved a social reach of 14.7 million users and nearly 1 million users visited the destinations.