Mumbai: MTV is a cultural home to the millennial generation, music fans and artists, it believes to entertain, lead, break stereotypes and collaborate with young people through its evocative communication. MTV has always stood out of the crowd with youth relevant shows like Roadies, Splitsvilla, Love School, MTV Unplugged, MTV Rock the Vote, Troll Police, The Anti Social Network and many more.
MTV Insights Studio presents “Mera Bharat Amazeballs”, an extensive study into the behaviour and mindset of the youth in India. This study draws insights from over 25,000+ youngsters across 400+ towns, continuing to lay out the latest youth trends for over a decade.
“While doing this study, I realized that if you look at every single parameter the last over 10 years and try and create a 10 year trend, then we might have some interesting anecdotes on it; money equals to happiness was an initial thought but overtime that thought has evolved to money is important, but there is a lot happening which I need to figure out.” said Navin Shenoy, Head of Marketing- Youth, Music and English Entertainment, Viacom18 in an exclusive conversation with Medianews4u.
Shenoy highlighted the point that how today’s youth are action-oriented and how they prefer being independent and don’t like to depend on anybody. With all these actionable insights they have incorporated in their much loved show Roadies which is coming up with its 17th season Roadies Revolution.
“With tasks not just being related to strength, but also doing tasks that support a cause and that could be building a school in a village, it could be environment and planting trees and that those would be the tasks, so in that sense, we will use an old show with a new insight that we bought”, said Shenoy
Shenoy spoke about how all the MTV shows do extremely well on VOOT and all the shows are always on the Top 5 Show category on Voot. Currently, Bigg Boss being the number one and followed by MTV shows. With VOOT hitting the hundred billion monthly active users last week, it’s nothing but a big achievement for them.
On the importance of being the catching trends before anyone else Shenoy said, “The fact we believe that we are India’s number one Youth platform, and the only way we will remain the number one youth platform is when we are able to show people that we are catching trends before anybody else. Trends should be seen as valuable by marketers who call us and tell us that we want to do next year’s planning.”
Shenoy also highlighted the fact that talent seems to be a huge thing for young people and that hip hop seems to have a low entry barrier. In comparison to classical singing or Bollywood playback singing, you need to have a trained voice but for hip hop, if you write really well, you can make an average level of delivery because it’s the poetry that’s making the impact more than your knowledge of vocals in classical music.
While the data of 2018 is compared to 2016, we asked Shenoy as to what relevance does it hold in 2020? Shenoy said, “Whether things have changed this year, will be commissioning the next round this year, by the second half, we’ll know whether it’s changed. But all our past experience shows us that things don’t change majorly between two years unless you have a dramatically different intervention. The only dramatically different intervention was two years back when telecom rates plummeted, and you pretty much had democratization of content and knowledge and there’s been no such thing, so we are quite confident. In fact, if you look at it these are not necessarily mass trends some of them are leading edge trends, which if you catch in time, then you will know what’s going to happen.”
About on- ground activities Shenoy discussed that young people are concerned about plastic, and which is why they did a brand activation called ‘Thrash Talk’ as normally people send you trashy comments online. For every trashy comment MTV cleaned up one kg of plastic and in doing that when you tell young people and they realize that this brand is getting behind the causes that we believe in and then affinity for your brand increases much more.
