Adgully Exclusive | Increasing the appetite for English movies: Star India's Saurabh Yagnik

Recently STAR movies celebrated the occasion of having achieved new records with 52 weeks of sustained leadership in the English Movie category. Saurabh Yagnik, Sr. VP & GM, English Cluster of Star India talks about their exquisite content strategy and qualities of Star that sets it apart from other players in an exclusive conversation with Adgully.

"Content strategy would be handled centrally by Honk Kong for the whole region for Star. Last year as a part of the reorganization that happened for Star TV, what happened is that we tried to see that each of the countries manage the businesses independently and there is a scale that we leverage as we operate in these markets. As a result of this reorganization, all of the India businesses including the international feeds of our channels were now housed as a business with Star India. Earlier the international business and the English content related were being controlled centrally out of Hong Kong. So for us it is about putting our insights about the consumers into play", Yagnik explained.

In any kind of business, localization is key feature to reach out to the consumers. Just the way McDonalds in India had to introduce different products that would appeal to the Indian audience, in the media business, the local taste and preferences have to be considered. "The local flavor is very important in a media business. At that point in time it was a central repository of knowledge and information across multiple cultures. That centralized structure what we believe is for the media," he further added.

In addition, he listed out a few key high points with the association of the channel, "The biggest association with star movies is that we were able to establish clearly 52 weeks of leadership in this space. That was one of the high points. Couple of other high points was how we packaged and provided the content the way people liked it. "For the love of Bond', "The Jackie Chan festival'- It was brilliantly packaged. It was something that people had a narrowed down understanding of what they could get or what promise the slot gave. That was what really brought up our ratings. The third proposition is about freshness. 12 blockbuster premieres in a year and 52 weekly premieres is a very large proposition. So that is the number of new titles we bring to India every year."

In an environment, when there are more than imaginable players in the same space, how does STAR Movies attempt to stand apart from the crowd?

"We study a lot more our consumers about what they like, what and how we should package our content, what is it that they, the consumers would like to see, what are the kind of genres that we should be looking at, these are the certain insights that we keep getting as we work with consumers," Yagnik said

Star together with the FOX international channels is a very dominant player in the English space. "If you look at it we will be having Star Movies, Star World, we have FX and Fox Crime, newly launched channels. In addition to that we have the NGC and Fox history and entertainment channels and the other new offerings like Nat Geo wild etc which are coming. I believe as an English portfolio and within the English portfolio if you look at the movie space, if you look at the general entertainment space, I think we have a well rounded proposition to offer to the consumers. I think we are strongly placed to take on any competition. We are also not just an India player; we are a player beyond India, so when we look at buying we have scale of South Asia, Middle East, India and the rest of Asia. We use that scale to build strategic relationships with studios. It's the strength of Star network itself. Star is the largest network in the country. We leverage that scale. It is easy to promote our channels across the whole network," he added on.

Content being a crucial aspect in roping in audience today, Yagnik further comments, "Content typically you see unlike Hindi GEC or any other Indian language channel, it's not that you commission content, it is about buying content from studios. So from our perspective, we leverage scale on buying across the regions, so there is India, South East Asia, and Middle East. So we leverage scale when we go to buy. What we have is strategic tie ups with studios where we get the best of titles year after year. That's on the content front. The second thing we need to bring as a part of the content is understand what works over here. Familiarity is a very big driver here in this country. So more the familiar the title, the more it rates. So we bring in a mix of familiarity and newness. It is that blend of familiarity and newness which helps people relate to the channel a lot more these are what I think is the core of business. After all English is a foreign language, you need to relate it. Yes India has a very high English speaking population but building that relativity is very important for driving the channels. The other thing that we did is subtitling which really helps in relativity."

Audiences are more active today with all kinds of mediums easily available at hand. According to Yagnik, to ensure audience engagement and the way to drive the consumption is to build up appointment to the channel which comes through familiarity, relativity and packaging.

Talking about the role of reaching out to their digital audience, Yagnik said, "We are working on building on a very large franchise is in the digital space, because that's where the overlap of our viewers is the highest. I mean whoever we target as viewers are very high users of internet and digital space, so how can we integrate to provide that 360 degree experience and start talking to them on social media in our website is something that we looking at as plans."

"Some of the digital activations have been a GLEE contest that we ran or when we ran a contest around MasterChef, when we used the social media and our website to package these kinds of event oriented schemes or contest around a particular show has worked very well for us. We have got 70,000 fans on facebook. We are also planning a contest around Lie to Me around its launch time," he further added.

Although at the moment, Star is focusing on bigger markets, Yagnik believes there is a definite future in looking beyond the bigger markets.

Talking about the two newly acquired channels Fox Crime and FX, he said, "There is Fox Crime channel which completely focuses on crime based shows. It has the potential to be a Star World. People like to see crime shows. That is a much larger offering. FX is actually a more evolved kind of channel. It is a niche channel"

Yagnik believes the appetite for English or International movie is increasing and more and more people are trying to provide relativity as a platform by providing easy to consume content. "Most content today get subtitled and they get dubbed so as to increase relativity. Distribution, packaging and choice of content are the key elements that will help you increase your GRPs," he further stated.

Television viewing may have evolved over the years and it may be necessary now to plan and package the content and deliver it on a silver platter as today consumers are choosier than ever before. | By Janees Antoo [janees(at)adgully.com]