If you have good content, viewers will come: NP Singh on Kapil's show

After weeks of speculations, it is now official – popular comedian Kapil Sharma will be returning to television on Sony Entertainment Television. The channel announced yesterday that the show will be called ‘The Kapil Sharma Show’ and will premiere on April 23, 2016 and will be aired on Saturdays and Sundays at 9 pm.

With this, Sony TV, which hasn’t had a very good run at the ratings charts in recent times, is looking to spruce up its weekend offerings. The channel also has two long running crime-based shows on weekends – ‘Crime Patrol’, which has been on air for 12 years and ‘CID’, which has been on air for 19 years.

Speaking to Adgully, NP Singh, CEO, Multi Screen Media (MSM), said that Sony also had plans for the 7 pm and the 8 pm slots, which would be announced soon.

When asked about continuing with the ‘Kapil Sharma’ branding for the new show, Singh maintained, “When we went and met a lot of our viewers, one thing that they uniformly asked for – since the news about Kapil coming to Sony had been in the air for quite some time – ‘When is the Kapil show coming on the channel?’ So if that’s how people were perceiving it, we thought that rather than moving away from the brand we might as well extenuate it and make it bigger. That’s why we decided to call it ‘The Kapil Sharma Show’.”

IPL and Kapil

When asked whether it was something of a gamble launching the show right in the middle of IPL Season 9, which is being held between April 9 and May 29, Singh said, “If you have good content, the viewers will come to you. IPL is now a mature property. We have a huge universe of viewership and they are diverse and they are looking at other kind of content that they want to watch. So, there are enough viewers that will watch IPL or a comedy show like ‘The Kapil Sharma Show’ or both at any point of time.”

He further said that ‘The Kapil Sharma Show’ was premium property and was being sold at the rate at which any premium property would be in the market. He, however, denied that rates were comparable with the IPL rates.

Promotion

Singh informed that the new show would be promoted through a 360-degree campaign using all MSM properties. In a bid to create greater connect with viewers, a unique initiative is being launched on SonyLiv platform, wherein they will have an opportunity to showcase their own videos and upload them, which will be seen by Kapil and his team. The lucky ones who are shortlisted will be invited to participate in the show as well.

Danish Khan, EVP and Business Head, Sony Entertainment Television, added here, “To start with, Kapil doesn’t do a lot of marketing as he is a very popular character. Having said that, there is a lot of pull in the market for both the concept as well as the character, which makes the marketing easy. As we are bringing comedy back on Sony at 9 pm, there is a lot of marketing lined up to drive viewership using multiple media, including digital, which will play a big role in the promotions. Thus, there will be both traditional and new media as well as a four-city tour – Delhi, Lucknow, Bhopal, and Amritsar – that we are undertaking pre-launch. The idea behind this city tour is to bring Kapil and the other actors of the show closer to the audience to get a feel of the show.” 

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