Nickleodeon has seen revenue growth of 30% in 2016: Nina Elavia Jaipura

Nickleodeon is all geared for its property, Kids Choice Awards (KCA), which will be held on December 2016. The first edition of KCA was held in 2013 after which it took a break for two years. Meanwhile, Nickleodeon has been performing well in the kid’s genre, maintaining its leadership position since the introduction of BARC. 

In conversation with Adgully, Nina Elavia Jaipura, EVP & Business Head, Kids Cluster, Viacom18, speaks about the growth drivers for Nickleodeon, the kid’s genre in India, strategy for the coming year and more. Excerpts: 

How has the growth curve of the kid’s genre in India been?
The kid’s genre is growing at a robust 11-12 per cent and is projected to reach over Rs 500 crore by the end of the year. In terms of viewership, it continues to be the third largest genre after general entertainment and movies. It continues to contribute about 6-8 per cent to the total 4+ TV viewership. Actually, it is no longer seen as a category meant just for kids and hence, along with kids advertisers, non-kids advertisers too are coming on to this platform to reach families and young parents who are there on the channel. 

What about the new players coming into the market, including the advent of OTT?
New players coming in is a great trend and is making the category more dynamic and robust. With OTT platforms like Voot Kids coming in, opportunities for kid’s content have further increased. It is thus a win-win situation for all the stakeholders. 

How has the growth of Indian content for kids been on Nickleodeon?
Indian content representation on Nickelodeon has been constantly increasing. We started with our first IP creation – ‘Motu Patlu’ in 2012, followed by ‘Pakdam Pakdai’ and then ‘Shiva’. We will continue to add to our Indian content library and are currently working on our next local IP. IP for Indian content is growing. Nickelodeon garners more than 50 per cent ratings for Indian content alone. As a genre also a lot of players are attempting local content. 

What is your content strategy for the coming year?
Like we have done in the past, strategic direction has been to create depth and width of library. We started with ‘Motu Patlu’, ‘Pakdam Pakdai’ and ‘Shiva’ and we are doing one more IP now, so it’s about creating a plethora of characters who will engage with the kids. It’s about creating new stories and newer episodes. Thus, the strategy is to continue to create new stories, episodes and new characters simultaneously as we go forward and create IPs that belong to Viacom18, which can then be leveraged across different platforms – be it digital, gaming, consumer products, licensing  and Voot Kids. 

How has Nick’s growth been in 2016?
As I said earlier, we are the leaders in this category with a market share of 22 per cent. Sonic has grown over 75 per cent from last year. We have seen a lot of growth in our ad sales and revenues as well. Nick has seen a revenue growth of 30 per cent, while Sonic has seen a growth of 50 per cent in its ad sales revenues. I think we can very safely say that it is our characters, stories and category innovations curated over the last year has propelled us to the No. 1 position and sustain it over the years. 

What is your brand engagement strategy?
In the last one year since BARC came into being (with rural ratings introduced in October last year), Nick has continued to be the No. 1 channel in the category with a 22 per cent market share, well ahead of category peers. 

This leadership, coupled with the width and depth of characters have contributed to increased brand partnerships. These partnerships now extend across kids advertisers (Britannia, ITC, etc.) and non-kid advertisers (LG, Honda, Eureka Forbes and Patanjali). The partnerships are going beyond the normal FCT vanilla spot to non-FCT customisation, licensing and on-ground activities as well. We are seeing a lot more integrations and engaging customisations. 

We also do school contact programmes, where brands get to associate with a captive audiences, for example, the school contact programme with Parle Agro. 

We now have the high decibel and impactful kids engagement platform with the Kids Choice Awards (KCA). For the Kids Choice Awards, we have got Dabur Lal Tooth Paste as the presenting sponsor; Lifebuoy and Choki Choki are co-powered by sponsors, while FunSkool is the associate sponsor. 

They have gained tremendous value with this partnership that provides reach and engagement across on-air and on-ground platforms. These promotions are spread across three months, starting with the voting phase and leading up to the on-air providing extensive outreach and continuous exposure for our brand partners. The high decibel on-air promotion for this impact property will see around 3,000 promos put on air to promote the same. 

It is thus a great win-win for all – the advertisers are able to reach out to their target audience in a clutter-breaking manner, while for Nickelodeon it is a custom made property that grows our viewership and revenues – and audiences are treated with a great visual experience. 

The Kids Choice Awards are the only awards focused on the kids segment in India and have been mounted at a very high scale with very popular and much loved celebrities such as Varun Dhawan and Alia Bhatt performing at the awards. We also have other renowned names like Manish Paul, Dramebaaz Kids, etc. Nickelodeon’s Kids Choice Awards 2016 is set to be a heady mix of fun, action and entertainment. 

We held the inaugural edition of Kids Choice Awards in 2013. Now we are set for the second edition of the Awards after a break in 2016. It will be a complete visual delight. In 2013, we didn’t have the whole plethora of characters that we have today. This year, you will see the whole Nick parade – there will be Motu and Patlu, Pakdam Pakdai, Shiva, Ninja Hatori and many more. You will see a completely different show, because of the sheer number of characters that we have, whom kids love. It’s going to be bigger and better. 

The Awards show would be telecast on Nickelodeon, Sonic, Nick Jr. and Nick HD+. KCA will also see the entire Viacom18 network come together to telecast the much awaited KCA 2016 across network channels – Colors, Rishtey, Colors Bangla, Colors Marathi, Colors Gujrati and the newest offering Voot. 

The awards are set to be held on December 5, 2016.

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