Celebrating its H1 2019 performance, Viacom18’s youth brand and television channel, MTV has announced various shows as part of its content plan for this quarter. While the brand boasts of delivering a strong performance of 700 million views across television and its OTT platform Voot and a total of 3.67 billion minutes of watch-time across TV and Voot, it is definitely growing by leaps and bounds as MTV consists of only scripted and unscripted reality shows while all the music is on MTV Beats.
While MTV’s classic Splitsvilla has been brought back for its 12th season obviously because of the growth the show contributes to the channel. Ace of Space has been renewed for its second season after a phenomenal response from the first season.
MTV is now launching a new reality show, MTV Hustle which is aimed to boost India’s hip-hop culture through television. The show claims to be India’s first-ever rap reality show, and will be judged by hip hop artists such as Nucleya, Raja Kumari and Raftaar who will mentor and support the contestants. The show will witness 15 rap talents from across India, battle it out to emerge as India’s biggest hip-hop star.
Brands which have associated with MTV Hustle are JBL, Philips One Blade, Breezer Vivid Live Life in Colour and Hike Messenger. The show is slotted for the weekends on Saturdays and Sundays at 7PM starting 10th August, 2019.
On MTV’s performance Ferzad Palia, Head – Youth, Music and English Entertainment, Viacom18 said,“The last 6 months have been great for us. We are the only brand to create original youth content in the space, there have been some brands which have been doing it online, the television space has broadly been blank on that front with any resemblance of youth content, a few TV channels who tried are quickly moving to music and as everyone is aware about our very strong music channel MTV Beats, that too has been doing extremely well.”
In an exclusive conversation with Palia, Medianews4u asked about across which medium would consumers enjoy the new Rap show, Hustle, TV or on Voot? Or does he expect single standalone tracks from the show going viral across social media.
In response Palia said, “I don’t know. We haven’t seen that there’s any one particular kind of content that is getting more consumption on Voot versus another type of content. I think all of the content is getting equally consumed in the same ratio irrespective of whether it’s a Splitsvilla or Roadies or an Ace of Space. I don’t see any necessarily reason why suddenly Hustle should show either some extra spike on TV or extra spike on OTT, to be honest.”
“But your question of single tracks in a show like this suddenly cause a spike? Yes, they can. We’ve seen that happen with The Stage, we’ve seen that happen on multiple shows before and that could happen. I suspect that given the kind of talent we have those single track push out may have a big spike, especially on social media.”
Talking about how LinkedIn get a job was one has been one of the best branded content creations of MTV and that it was jointly thought about by LinkedIn and the creative team at MTV, Palia said, “You know, there are several times where you work backwards to a particular brief that a brand gives you but always keep in mind that any content creator always has a lot of ideation that goes on irrespective. So there’s always hundreds of ideas that you have, so I think when LinkedIn came to us and we spoke to LinkedIn, the strong part was we were already thinking along those lines of getting people internships which came from an insight saying people at this age find it very difficult to get an internship. Normally internships are going because one has a few references and one’s uncle knows someone in somebody’s office.”
“So the ‘sifarish’ culture was annoying the youth that’s how the genesis of the thought came. And then we got together with LinkedIn and obviously scaled it up into what it is today. So I think it could be both of us that put our hats together and, and came up with the format it is today.”
Speaking about the insights that MTV uses from its nationwide Youth Survey Palia said, “We use those insights differently for different things, in the past, we’ve changed hosts, because of the kind of feedback we’ve got not on the host because we don’t want to ask about our shows, but by seeing that this particular audience is moving in this kind of a way this screaming and yelling is not going to work anymore.Or it’s okay to introduce a gay couple into love school because the youth are very comfortable with same sex relationships. While we were working on Hustle one very strong insight came about the youth was that they want to make their name on talent is not only about how much money they make, it’s a new generation.”
Elaborating on where Palia sees MTV 6 months down the line, he said, “I see MTV in a far more solid place than it was about 24 months back because at that point in time, we were trying to straddle music and content, I think we’ve used this time well, of course, one can always say that we could have done more and we should have done more. But I think it would be in a far stronger position given the number of original hours of content that we’re creating every weekto take an even bigger leap from where more content is concerned.”
“And I think it’s a process right when you have such an iconic brand, whose main heritage and recall is music and then have one strong pillar which is music with MTV beats and then this brand new pillar of a genre which we started, which is reality and then scale that up is a process. Right?”
Continuing, Palia said, “I think did not believe that it’s all going to happen in three months or six months, it takes its own time and I think we’ve been able to fast track the amount of time that it would have otherwise taken into being a full-fledged content creator quite rapidly. I think six months from now, maybe a couple more formats, new formats better andstronger and a lot more consumption across both TV and Voot.”
