Adgully Exclusive | We are the powerhouse of Bollywood content: zoOm's Avinash Kaul

Viewership ratings indicated that zoOm is ahead of the competition with 35 GRPs. (Source: TAM, Market: HSM 1million, TG: SEC 15-24 AB, All Days, 24 hours, from 19 June to 16 July 2011).

The Bollywood entertainment genre has seen supreme growth and seeing new player's entering the market. Adgully caught up with Avinash Kaul, Chief Executive Officer, Zoom Entertainment Television, to know more about the latest content development across the channel and his youth centric engagement plans for the channel.

Talking about what has worked in totality for the channel's high GRP, Kaul says, "It is never one thing that makes something work, more so when it comes to programming strategy a lot of things come into play. So what we have essentially done is that we have sharpened our focus a bit more and identified the key pillars of our programming. So we also changed our tagline to India's No.1 Bollywood channel."

He further adds that that channel has news as a significant pillar of its programming and which is then followed by movies, music, features and countdown. "The aforementioned aspects are our channel's core strengths. So we have just honed our focus on each of these strengths," Kaul points out.

In the last six months zoOm started off by having 5 news slots of 30 minutes of every day. Hence, spreading the channel's Bollywood news quotient that way. Further elaborating about the programming changes, Kaul says, "In the recent past we have launched concepts like one minute news which is essentially a catch up of Bollywood news on the go. So this led to texturing the entire programming DNA of our channel. We have cleaned up our playlist and the way we used to look at music. The music we offer now is more energetic and youthful. In terms of our movie programming too our choice of movies has also considerably improved and there are more youth-oriented movies. Each of our shows have been revamped to match our viewer's high expectation in terms of a complete brand experience. Our packaging will always be about inclusive viewing because it is all about creating the perfect brand experience for our viewers."

The channel also relaunched Planet Bollywood and called it Planet Bollywood News; because it wanted to change the perception that the show provided dated information and wanted to make the show more current.

Kaul adds, "We have also spent a significant amount of time and energy on cleaning up the navigation tools on the channel. We have more than doubled our GRP over the span of 8-9 months and if you see the recent week's data we are the Number 1 channel in the youth channel category on its whole."

zoOm targets the youth, its target audiences being in the age group of 15- 24 years and SEC A and B. "So we are essentially targeting the upscale and upmarket youth," he elucidates.

Talking about the channel's impending use of digital medium, Kaul says, "We have taken huge strides in the digital space, because our core TG being youth it is a given fact that they are tech-savvy and digitally inclined. So we have pushed our content aggressively across all digital platforms. On our Facebook page we have got around 7 lakh followers and it is also one of the most interactive pages. We boast of around 2 crore impressions in a week on Facebook, so every post of ours gets around 5000 responses in terms of likes or comments."

zoOm boasts of being the No.1 media brand on Youtube in India, the channel has got around 42 crore video views. Moreover 10-15% of this consumption happens through mobile phone.

Kaul adds, "We are also leveraging on the fact that Indians living in countries across the globe are also deeply passionate about Bollywood. Following India, high traction is garnered from USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand and in terms of cities in South Asia, Karachi tops the list."

The channel is available across 17 to 18 countries globally and the channel's content is seamlessly available across mobile and internet. "So this technically makes us the powerhouse of Bollywood content and arguably makes us the world's No.1 Bollywood destination," he adds while signing off.

The channel plans to launch a debate-based show where industry leaders will discuss a week's important issue or happening in Bollywood. Moreover zoOm also plans to launch a Bollywood Trade Summit wherein the industry can come together and discuss the challenges, opportunities and latest developments that the industry faces as a whole. | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]