Zee is a fun competitor to compete with in the Marathi space: Anuj Poddar

Colors Marathi is bullish on ‘Kon Hoeel Marathi Crorepati 3’, which went on air on October 3, 2016. Sporting the tagline ‘Sukhachya Shubharambh’, the game show has a new host for its third season – Swwapnil Joshi. Aired on Monday to Wednesday from 9 pm to 10.30 pm, the stakes are higher for ‘Kon Hoeel Marathi Crorepati 3’, which is offering a prize money of Rs 3 crore .

The quiz-based show has replaced two of Colors Marathi’s shows – ‘Tujhya Vachun Karmena’ and ‘Awaaz’. For Season 3, Rin has come on board as the presenting sponsor, while Jio, Saraswat Bank and Kesari are the associate sponsors.

In conversation with Adgully, Anuj Poddar, Business Head, Marathi & Gujarati, Viacom18 Media, speaks about the growth of the Marathi television space, Colors Marathi’s growth strategy, content plan and more. Excerpts:

How has been the growth of the Marathi television space been like in the last couple of years? What have been the key growth drivers?
The biggest growth change happens when there is competition, and I think maybe we have played a small part in that growth in the last 2-3 years. When we entered the Marathi television space, we tried to shake things up a bit by raising the bar on the quality of content, production values in terms of not just the look and feel but also story writing, scripting and the formats. We have been producing genuinely good content. With that the competition also geared up and, therefore, I think I would give full credit to my competitors as well. All of us are doing a good job. And in all this, the biggest beneficiary is the audience, the viewers. Thus, growth of the genre happens when finally there is good content happening on the television.

Today’s generation will not watch you unless you give them current, contemporary, new age content that looks and feels as any good as the other. Therefore, if you look at the Marathi channels today, they look as good as a Hindi GEC, so young Maharashtrians will feel happy and proud watching them as they have something aspirational to look forward to and not watch them out of some sentimental feelings of staying connected with their roots. And that was one of the reasons why we launched ‘Kaun Banega Crorepati’ in its Marathi version. The set, the look and feel of the show are exactly the same as the Hindi version. It is not a watered down version and we have not compromised on anything. It gives the same experience to the viewers.

What is Colors Marathi’s share of the Marathi television market?
Today, we are a fast growing channel. I acknowledge that there is a leader in the market that is not us, but we have grown our share substantially over the last three years. Today, we hover between 28 per cent and 35 per cent of the market share in the Marathi GEC space. We are a strong No. 2 player. When we launched, we were a distant No. 3. From there we went on to become a significant No. 3 and now have become a very strong No. 2.

Zee has been quite bullish on its growth in the Marathi space, they are also launching a youth-targetted channel. How is Colors Marathi strategising to meet the competition head-on?
Firstly, when we plan our strategy, we are not thinking about our competitor, but our audience, and I know that if I think about my audience and do what is right for them, then my competition issues are taken care of. Our growth has happened because we are thinking about our audience first. Having said that, it is fun to compete, I enjoy good competition; if the competition is not giving me a tough fight, then there will be no fun in the job, so we enjoy that part of the game. I think Zee is a fun competitor to compete with. I know when I’m saying this on the record that 2-3 years ago when we first started out, they were not losing sleep because of us. They were not really watching us as closely. But I know that if there’s anybody that they are watching very closely today, it is us. So, I think that is a compliment to our team that we have become so strong in the market that we can make them watch our every single move and try and counter strategise everything that we do. 

From ETV to Colors Marathi – how has been the journey been like?
It has been a very interesting journey, and at the same time it has also been a difficult journey because of the many challenges. What we had inherited was a business with a strong legacy, but clearly it was not in the best of health at that point of time and needed a lot of re-fixing and reinventing. Having gone through that phase, sometimes I think maybe it is easier to start a new channel. You start with a clean slate as far as the audience is concerned; in this case we had to get on board what was a running ship so we didn’t have the luxury of time to develop things from the beginning and then one fine day starting the operations, because you only start running in the moment to enter the race.

Secondly, you start with a certain baggage that part of the audience has developed towards you or against you. You have to undo that, so to undo a lot of baggage, it requires us to work all that harder just create a new impression on something. But we are over the first phase, which involved undoing a lot of perceptions that had grown around the channel in the recent past and now we are on a clean slate. And it is very positively received today. While we are not the No. 1 channel in terms of ratings, I think one of the things that we established in the consumers’ minds is that though we are not the No. 1 yet, we are the leaders in doing new things. We have always been the risk takers, we’ve been the innovators, and we’ve been the ones setting the new agenda for a genre.