By: Yohan P Chawla
With the immense success achieved from Colors Kannada Cinema, Viacom18 is now launching its second regional movie channel in Gujarati, COLORS Gujarati Cinema with the tagline, Filmo Matrubhasha Ma, which means movies in your mother-tongue. The channel will go live from the 1st of June with 8 blockbuster premieres for 8 days at 8 PM.
The launch strategy of 8 movie premieres back to back is a tried and tested formula which Viacom18 had previously used when they launched Colors Kannada Cinema with 5 premieres on 5 consecutive days, back in September, 2018. And it worked very well for the channel.
Viacom18 already leads the Gujarati television market with its GEC Colors Gujarati; it now plans to expand its reach and content offering with a premium movie channel for all the lovers of Gujarati cinema across the country.
On the launch of Colors Gujarati Cinema, Ravish Kumar – Head – Regional TV Network, Viacom18, told Medianews4u, “The combination of the whole bunch of classic movies combined with a sprinkle of brand new movies is going to be a massive first for the market, because at the end of the day, while movies may be huge, the box office collections are still finite and the number of people who actually see it is finite. So television gives you the ability to literally reach lakhs and millions of houses.”
On Colors Kannada Cinema’s performance, Kumar said, “Colors Kannada Cinema is a strong number two player in the market, Udaya is ahead of us but we are ahead of Suvarna Plus. So it has occupied a great position for us because they didn’t come at the expense of anything. We were anyway acquiring movies for Colors Kannada and Colors Super. And we had enough titles under our belt anyway. So it just gave us an additional platform to sort of, you know, use the content we already had within us, and also to reach out to a variety of viewers, especially in this environment where movies are really driving reach.”
Speaking about Colors Gujarati, Kumar said, “Colors Gujarati has been doing very, very well. I think we’ve grown significantly in the last year. Our shows continue to get stronger day by day, we continue to invest more in putting new shows out there.”
“We have relocated our teams from Mumbai to Ahmedabad because that’s a function of our commitment to go in the market. We want our shows to be based there, to be made there, and to grow the ecosystem there, which is why the Movie Channel is also being launched.”
Talking about the launch strategy for Colors Gujarati Cinema, Kumar said, “On Colors Gujarati Cinema, we are doing eight premieres, eight days at 8pm, and we’re launching on the 1st of June, which is a Saturday so it’ll be from Saturday to Sunday, the following week.
“And in addition to that we are spending more than 2.5 CR on the marketing campaign for the launch of the channel, which is massive for that market; 400 plus hoardings, bus panels all across the state. In cinema theaters we are running our promos in advance of the Salman Khan film, Bharat. Cross channel obviously, we’re very strong. We’ve covered all the news channels. For Print we have full page jackets releasing on the first and the second of June. We have quarter pages releasing the week after and massive presence across radio.”
On the advertiser response, Kumar said, “I think the very fact that we already have three sponsors on board indicates that the response is fantastic. And all of this is before the channel has even launched. You know, there was interest in this from the day when we put up the test signal. I mean, we actually learnt that it has got some great initial numbers, in terms of ratings. At a time when we were just running a new set of movies, never seen channels with absolutely zero advertising and sort of equals zero titles, we’re actually getting a lot of viewership already.”
