We came in & woke up the English genre from its slumber: Ferzad Palia

Colors Infinity, Viacom18’s English General Entertainment Channel under the flagship brand Colors, has completed a year. Starting with eight international premieres and eight advertisers on board, Colors Infinity reached out to the 200 million audience, managing to not only capture 60 per cent of viewership from the aspirational, neo-urban consumer in the country, but also witnessing a rapid growth with over 100 advertisers on board today, including brands ranging across Automobiles, Ecommerce, FMCG and Electronics categories. The channel introduced for the first time on Indian Television a bouquet of distinctive propositions, including Essential Viewing, Instant Premieres, Live Binge, Infinity-On-Demand and local homegrown content.

Keeping disruption as its domain, the programming was constantly supported with disruptive marketing campaigns. The channel has consistently initiated unique marketing campaigns since its inception.

Speaking on the occasion of the first anniversary of Colors Infinity, Ferzad Palia, Head, English and Youth Entertainment, Viacom18, said, “At the very onset, we were faced with unequivocal opinions of futility, but today celebrating a thriving completion of one year makes the anniversary an even more momentous occasion for us at Colors Infinity. We stayed true and committed to our vision of expanding the viewership base of English entertainment in general and increase the market share of Viacom18’s English cluster. With 60 per cent of Colors Infinity’s viewership coming in from the non-metro market and our English cluster commanding 53 per cent market share in the genre, I’d say we are well on track to realise our vision.”

He further added, “We’ve also seen a very encouraging quarterly advertising growth of ~30 per cent, in terms of the number of advertisers coming on board. This in turn has helped us capitalise on our effective rate as well. This year, we plan to increase our focus on local English content as well as bring in the latest seasons of our popular shows. Finally, we are committed to continue our innovations on the viewing experience with Infinity-On-Demand, instant premieres and essential viewing.”

AdGully caught up with Ferzad Palia to more about Colors Infinity’s performance in the last one year, the content strategy, the road ahead, and more. Excerpts:

What kind of content has worked for you?
I think there are different kinds of content that have worked for us. There is drama and drama with action that has worked well for us – shows like ‘Last Ship’, ‘Tyrant’, ‘The Royals’, ‘The Big Sea’. We have seen reality work wonderfully for us; ‘My Kitchen Rules’ has blown the lid of everything else. ‘Shark Tank’ has been a phenomenal success and got the entire country talking. We have seen success across formats. Our local production, ‘The Stage’, too has worked phenomenally and we will be back with Season 2 of ‘The Stage’. You will see more local productions from us.

What have been the key learnings over the last one year?
There have been lots of learnings. The one good learning for us is that we put our best foot forward with our marketing exercise when we launched. We expanded the category, differentiation really worked, and that is something we are pretty good at, I would like to believe. We have made great strides in our local production. Though to be honest, initially we were a bit sceptical about whether it would work or not, but it has done wonderfully well because we did a format that has never been done before on English Television. So, there is a lot of good learnings for us. So, we will keep experimenting and see how it goes for more learnings.

You launched one AFP last year, are there more AFPs planned for this year?
We don’t look at them as AFP or non-AFP, we generally look at it as content and we need to monetise that content. We have been consistently putting out new concepts and hopefully continue to monetise them as well.

Apart from the content part, what have been the other highlights for you?
One has been to establish the prime time very, very quickly. Because of the differentiation marketing we did, I think we have established the service and the brands in the first couple of months itself, which is tremendous for an English language service and operation. The other part is the fact that we have been able to monetise really well, we have got 100-plus advertisers, which again in English language category is a compelling sort of task, but we managed to do it. Our run rates are very healthy. I think those have been the two biggest highlights for us. The biggest one of course is the brand being differentiated and received well by consumers and advertisers alike.

With the kind of investments that you have made on your shows and the returns on the advertising front – does it match up?
It may appear to people that we have spent a lot more than we actually have. I think what we actually did is we undertook things with great impact and, therefore, the differentiation and noise level we got around everything we did was superlative. So when that happens, people tend to think we busted a lot of money on marketing, but we actually didn’t. We were just differentiated and innovative about it and that’s what sort of stood out.

In percentage terms, what has been growth in ad rates like?
I think it’s not so much about growth, when you talk about growth, it is on a year-on-year basis and we have just completed our first year. So the first year was all about establishing our ad rates, we will now see growth from the second year on. There are two tasks for us – the first is that while we set an extremely aggressive benchmark for ourselves in the market, that needs to grow now. The other part is broadening the base and having more people sharing the passion that we have.

You have had distinctive properties like Infinity On Demand, Binge Watching, etc. When you look back, how did that actually play out in connecting with the audience?
I honestly believe that this is the best thing that we ever did, which is why we didn’t stay bucketed to the way the genre was operating, we came in and sort of woke up the entire genre from its slumber. We did things differently and that’s really what stood us in good stead, because that’s where advertisers have seen value and said so here’s a bunch of people who are seeing things in consumers’ wants. In fact, we have so many brand new shows that we don’t know where to place them right now.

The other part that they appreciate is that the consumers say, “We don’t want to watch one episode at one point of time, we want to watch more episodes at a given point of time”. So that’s what Essential Viewing was all about, where we aired three episodes back to back and people have loved that. It’s not a rocket science. We have just taken what consumer said and implemented it as the insight we got from consumers and both advertisers and consumers have, therefore, seen value because there is seamless effort in it.