Event Capital is a Live Entertainment IP aggregator and gradually got into co-creation of Live Entertainment IPs through structured partnerships. The company now has over 8 IPs in their bouquet catering to a wide variety of audiences. Most of their IPs is in season 4-5 of their life cycle. Event Capital IP’s are primarily focused on the Youth, Music, Kids, Gaming & lifestyle space.
The most hit industry due to this pandemic is the Event Companies that organize large live events & IP’s. Medianews4u spoke to Shyam Chhabria, CEO Event Capital, India’s most diverse IP specialist company involved in aggregating and consolidating Event IPs across interest communities. Recently the company has paved its way towards an organic path to their business, they have pivoted to Content curating Content for both platforms and Brands. (Fiction& Non-Fiction).
Event Capital completes 8 years in the business of creating Live Entertainment IP’s, how challenging has the business been?
We started our journey with a vision of aggregating and curating IPs. The idea was to clearly lead the pathway in the Live Entertainment space. We have successfully managed to curate leading IP’s across verticals and established a scalable business model. The journey so far has both been full of excitement and challenges; the IP business is very capital intensive and requires substantial investments and patience for the first 2-3 years till you see a positive turnaround of revenue streams, communities forming around the IP, brand partnerships developing and the IP being established as a brand in totality. We have been fortunate to create IP’s with the right partners and have brands and consumers being part of our journey through the lifecycle of our IPs. India’s IP landscape is more skewed towards brand sponsorships and ticketing and what drives both brands and consumers to our IPs is our unique programming, outstanding production values, talent showcase, and a conducive environment for consumers to feel part of the IP.
The pandemic has brought Live Events to a standstill, how have you coped with this?
I feel the pandemic has given the Industry new ways to curate the business of IPs and keep brands and consumers engaged. Disruptive Innovation is the key and has seen new formats arise in the Industry, we started our approach during the pandemic last year with our foray into content curation from our IPs, our first content showcase was curated for TIKTOK Live, Bollywood Music Project led the curation in this case and this gave us the confidence to build a standalone content-led business model, we also curated select Virtual events which were brand-led and were curated around brand partner objectives using the IP ecosystem and communities. While we have forayed and launched into the Content Business, we eagerly await the coming back of our core Live Entertainment Business and what we hope to see 2022 as the year of IPS as the Industry, brands && consumers are all starved for this to happen.
The future sees more and more Viral Events, your thoughts?
The future is clearly Hybrid. We have all learned of a new way to interact, conduct our business and engage with customers which is existing in a Hybrid ecosystem. Currently, Virtual events have been springing up across Industries, does this meet all objectives? I would say few, not all, the personal touch has a different impact and the Hybrid model will define that where new models of events are curated showcasing Digital Journeys, Content curation, virtual environments, and smaller more focused meets. What this has done for the Industry is expand our reach in terms of audiences; we are no more local but national & global.
What will be the newer and out-of-the-box innovations in the Live Entertainment industry?
My above response kind of covers this but what I feel is that disruptive thinking and creating new value models will help businesses not only survive but create substantial models to multiply their revenue earning potential. Digital & Content will lead the way forward.
You have created many branded content in the Music & News industry. How different is this from other kinds of branded content?
Till date what we have created has been somewhere linked to the core of our business which is Live IP curation on the ground. We have created successful branded content innovations for leading brands. What we are about to launch is a mainstream nonfiction content format created for a brand. This is our showcase and forays as a mainstream content producer and from being Events first we have adopted a new strategy of going content first and we are wearing Multiple hats here from creating content, creating a distribution strategy, and driving the digital marketing for the format.
What will be the business strategy in wooing back the advertisers to LIve Entertainment in the new normal?
We feel brands are early awaiting the coming back of the Live Entertainment Industry and are looking at ways of engaging the consumer. Though in the current times what will drive the advertisers back into IP’s is Brand Safety – New Social distancing measures will need to be applied to get both consumers and brands to participate. I also feel the focus will be more on driving value through targeted audiences attending the event than Driving volume, with a major impact on the pocket size of the consumer and on brand spends IP’s will have to be curated with key innovations and unique drivers to get accepted both by brands and audiences, IPs will also need to be curated with 360-degree lenses to communicate to a larger audience base and offer a larger outreach to the brand. So to sum it up Brand Safety, Higher reachability, Innovations will lead the way to drive brands in the new normal.
Way forward and focus on Event Capital in 2021-2022?
We have forayed into Original Content by creating Event Originals and our core focus is to create unique innovations in Content linked to our IPs, our objective is to clearly create new communities through our journey And build scalable business models with our core being Live Entertainment IPs. We have begun our journey with mainstream content curation with our first show going Live in August and we have carved a pathway with many other formats to go live in 2021-2022. We have also created city-centric ground models to take our IPs national and travel across cities. So we have lots of excitement planned across Content & IPs. And as it is rightly said “A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step”, we have taken our first step and embarked on an exciting journey.
