The Campaign

Branded Entertainment in the Indian Media Context is the skillful symbiosis of brand strategy and programme context to elicit greater brand engagement within a target demographic. It also enhances brand proposition. It is not primarily a focus on product placement or overt brand editorial. Typically Branded Entertainment in India has moved slowly to the advertising space with special cost implications. An advertiser has to exclusively buy these slots against big ticket sponsorships with a premium levied. Therefore the distinction between pure advertising and branded content is blurring. It has legal implication and requires a tri-partite agreement amongst brand, channel partner and agency.

Results

We integrated our brand into the communication which ensured brand visibility and recall every time the commercial was played anywhere (TV, online, on- ground etc.) and tweaked the presence to make it look a part of the narrative This ran in high rotation across the tournament, skewed primarily towards India Playing Matches with scores at an avg. TVR of 3.5 vs. Non India Matches which were at a lower avg. of 1.75, which itself gave a huge spike in terms of viewership. The channel partner (Star) was running contextual “Mauka Mauka” ads where a delivery guy goes and delivers something to the protagonist’s house. We customised the delivery box to a YepMe delivery box, thus ensuring that the brand was weaved into the storyline seamlessly resulting in over 1.7 Mn views on youtube alone only.

The 15-35 in India is crazy about cricket and World Cup 2015 was the biggest cricketing extravaganza for the cricket fans. We decided to ride on to the World Cup wave to get maximum visibility. However, as the clutter was higher (as many advertisers, both competing and non- competing, were advertising) we decided to break the clutter by doing more than just running the TVC or standard innovations like L- bands, tags etc. The initial Mauka Mauka series attracted 0.1 Mn views . Contextual Branding of the same content with Yepme branding resulted in over 1.7 Mn youtube views

1. Website visits doubled 2. Average unique live traffic grew by over 200% 3. The integration resulted in 25 times free on- air time than the TVCs of the brand at no extra cost 4. The video got 1.7 million+ views on YouTube with zero investments 5. The brand garnered 10 million+ impressions across social (as twitter mentions, Fb tags, shares etc.) 6. 2000+ extra GRPs on Star Sports at zero extra cost. 7. Major visibility across 9 Star network channels without paying any extra money 8. Free visibility worth INR 50 Cr ($76 Mn) in terms of media money

Leveraging synergies of an existing platform on the TV Partner for World Cup for the brand. Star India created a series of content called "Mauka Mauka" which were to beef up the team spirit and add buzz and talkability around the world cup. This ad an unique opportunity where delivery of team shirts and other elements were being shown door to door. The channel network was running the ’Mauka Mauka’ ads for each of the matches and they were getting huge views (average 1 lakh views per video) and were talked about across social (#MaukaMauka was trending on twitter). Our strategy was to latch on to this unique opportunity this ‘mauka mauka’ madness gave us by integrating the brand into the content. And seamlessly create our branded delivery boxes.