Why is this work relevant for Entertainment?

During the Covid induced lockdown in India, there was an accelerated adoption of OTT platforms with audiences flocking to this new medium to keep themselves entertained. MX Player’s Raktanchal, was primed to take over the platform as the latest high octane, action packed drama amidst a slew of other engaging shows. This series revolves around the lives of two gangsters, Vijay & Waseem, chronicling their brutal war to control the territory of Purvanchal. MX Player was in a unique position to draw audiences to the platform with a campaign that truly brought to life the world of Raktanchal, online.

Background

With this launch, the platform aimed to redefine dramas set in small towns in India (a genre that is a favourite amongst MX Player viewers), and bring back the big, bad and bold gangsters to the target audience’s preferred choice of screen. This genre (crime drama) was ruling the roost even among other OTT platforms in India, so the aim was to break the clutter from existing shows that also used the same backdrop in their storytelling. The primary TG of MX Player (Millennials and GenZ) was also spending much of their screen time in casual gaming during the lockdown. The objective was to drive new user engagement and create awareness for this series – without traditional marketing tools like OOH and outdoor events due to the pandemic.

Describe the creative idea

Our audience often binge-watches shows and plays games on their smartphone, so we chose the mobile version of PubG for the launch. The game has a large number of Indian E-Sports professionals who actively livestream the game on YouTube. We collaborated with one such pro PubG player, Naman Mathur AKA Mortal (Ranked Top 10 India) and his team Soul Army (Second runner up in PubG Mobile Open Club Tournament 2019), to recreate the conflict inspired from the show. Mortal went live on his Youtube channel announcing his team’s new name. The change from Soul Army to Raktanchal Army increased the chatter amongst players and their viewers. Various aspects of the show (dialogues and action sequences) were integrated within the game’s livestream to engage with the audience. The aim was to take over the game for a day and turn the virtual world of PubG into the fictional one of Raktanchal.

Describe the strategy

With all on-ground initiatives being disrupted and a large void created with the lack of OOH and events, we rechanneled our efforts to reach consumers where they are most active. ONLINE. The primary target audience for Raktanchal are males from 18 to 30 year olds. We observed that the audience in this age group and demographic were avid players of multiplayer mobile games specifically PubG. At the time of the shows announcement, PubG was still the biggest and most played multiplayer mobile game in India (50M downloads and 33M active users in India – 2019). These numbers spiked to over 100 million players during the lockdown in the first half 2020. This intersection of casual gamers and content consumers created the perfect mix to promote the story of Raktanchal via the livestream of one of the top PubG Esports professionals in India.

Describe the execution

We identified the top Indian PubG team Soul Army, led by the gamer called Naman Mathur AKA Mortal. We collaborated with the team to change their team name from SOUL to Raktanchal. They announced on their personal Instagram profiles that the team would be undergoing a big change along with the date and time for the next PubG Youtube livestream. Mortal then went live on his Youtube channel (4.9 million subscribers at the time of the live stream) The big reveal - Soul Army was now Raktanchal Army Using the private lobby feature within the game, teams were made and the battle began with Mortal and his teammates pretending to be the gang leaders from the show. In the 2 hour live stream, Mortal and his team engaged with their viewers using dialogues from the show, tactics inspired from the gang leaders and even recreated pivotal scenes within the game.

Describe the outcome

150000+ concurrent viewers on the live stream at its peak 1,20,000+ show tune-ins within 24 Hours Raktanchal became the No. 1 trending show on MX Player for that period of time Most engaged branded activity of MX Player