SCREENXX 2020: Decoding what Young India wants

There has been a paradigm shift in consumer behaviour during and post the lockdown. Content consumption in the OTT space has gone up in the last few months. Is this a temporary shift or can we expect OTT to emerge as the prime media, especially for the youth in India? The shift has also brought into focus the content part, as creating relevant content and addressing the new set of audiences will be a challenge.

The spotlight was on the youth of India and their preferences in a fireside chat on ‘What Young India wants? A peep into the minds of GenZ and Youth in a post Covid World’ as part of SCREENXX 2020, which saw Pooja Jauhari, CEO, The Glitch, in conversation with Navin Shenoy, Head of Marketing, Youth, Music, English Entertainment, Viacom18.

Speaking about the youth during the COVID period, Navin Shenoy remarked that content has definitely been one of the coping mechanisms for young people. “We saw different trends at our end from linear TV to OTT platform Voot, and we think some of the changes will be there in the long term. As per BARC-Nielsen data, those that saw a significant increase are video content, VOIP, and gaming, whereas surprisingly, social media has gone down.”

Agreeing with Shenoy, Pooja Jauhari said that at the same time, “social media has given us a lot of insights on the content that we have created for our clients. We built out a whole of Netflix home stories through the things going on social media and the impact of the lockdown on mental health, relationships, etc. I do think that the impact of this pandemic is going to stay for a long time.”

“Today, young people don’t want brands to use purpose for the sake of purpose, that’s the biggest trend and advice we give to our clients,” she further said.

“In terms of content, what we are looking at is information and inspiration,” said Shenoy, adding, “Diversity has always been big on our agenda. People are looking at self-improvement more, especially the young people, during the lockdown period. For the past 6-7 months I have noticed a much shorter consumption package trend going on, there is like a lean in and lean on kind of version of content.”

Talking about the learnings during this period, Jauhari said, “One thing that we learnt is that production is not the dark hole that sucks out money, there are many different ways of putting content out there. From a creativity standpoint, we are against ‘causevertising’ as an agency. And is important for us to be authentic, extremely diverse, and represent different kind of consumers.”

Catch the engaging conversation here: