It’s been a big year for Nickelodeon, both in terms of revenue as well as viewership. Nina Elavia Jaipuria, Executive Vice President and Business Head of the Kids Cluster at Viacom 18 shares with Anuka Roy how the last business year, her big plans for the brand. Read on…
So how is Shiva doing? That was the highlight of the last year among the various new things you did…
Yes, Shiva is one of the many highlights that we had. One of them being, we have been #1 for the past 20 months, but the fact that Shiva broke all the roles in one shot. I have worked for this category for almost a decade now and I haven’t seen a launch like Shiva. So, I’ll just take a step back to explain to you why. Normally when you launch a show on a channel, it’s a new character and children of course have not seen too much of that character. They are currently watching a toon or a character that they really love, a show that they really love and therefore they fall in love and are habituated to watching what they really like to watch. When a new character is launched, it usually takes some time for kids to warm up to the character, you have to start liking the character, the character has to grow on you.
Shiva broke all the rules because in the first week of Shiva’s launch, it was the second slot in the category in the second week onward, it was the number one show in the genre. So, not just for Nickelodeon but as a category I am saying. It continues till date to have at least two, three or four slots in the Top 10 of the category. Highlight is an underestimation. We had done an extensive need gap study to say that Nickelodeon as a franchise doesn’t have an action- comedy genre. And therefore, we identified it as a need gap, gone after it, created a show which had fabulous storytelling, character and animation. So, all put together it was like a full masala-action-adventure-comedy plot. I think that was what probably clicked with kids and continues to click with them. Even as of date today it continues to be 12 % of our ratings. Even though it is only five months old and has limited episodes, because episodes are in the making whereas Motu Patlu and Pakdam Pakdai have significant library, but even with a limited library Shiva has made a big mark. And that is why I am going to continue without even asking what the story is. The story is we are moving Shiva to Sonic and that’s a very bold, brave and strategic decision we are making. That’s the focus for this year as well that while we maintain the number one position in Nick, we take Sonic to an all new high and hope that channel as well to become a very strong second competitor. For that reason, we are taking all the loyal viewers of Nick and Shiva and moving them to Sonic. Hopefully, the audience will move with show as well, that’s what the hypothesis is. And we have a huge summer campaign to follow it up in the vacation which will create awareness about Shiva on Sonic.
Fiscal year 2015-16 has been yet another year of leadership for Nickelodeon. We saw it launching in HD. And we have seen the entry of the BARC ratings plus rural numbers. How has the year been for Nick? Not just Nick, but the entire slew of channels under the categories you look.
It has been fabulous. From a financial year perspective our toplines have really grown. The Nick yield is the biggest highlight for me, which has growing two years in a now. Last year, we grew it by 40%. So, monetisation of Nick along with the number one position is the big highlight for me and the fact that, we have grown our entire topline which consists of Ad Sales, Ancillary revenue. All of that has grown by a robust percentage and we have tripled our bottom line as well, two years consecutively. So, we are a profitable vertical at Viacom 18, which is delivering to the Viacom 18 profits now. From the genre perspective, adsales grew as well. It has been consistently growing year after year. So, we are correcting the under indexation and I am happy to say that, finally, it is in the right trajectory. A lot of growth expected in the adsales pie as well. While it was at a 1%, today it is at 3% of the adsales pie. We have a lot of non-kid advertisers joining in. Almost 58% of our advertisers today are non-kid. I do From a viewership perspective also we continue to grow and continue to have 6% of our total viewership is the kids’ genre, so, that hasn’t gone away anywhere. In fact, in the urban it is at 8%. We are a very big genre, bigger than news, music, sports, infotainment and all of that.  It’s a big genre with total viewership coverage of about 6-8%…
Any noteworthy trends that you would like to highlight.
The trend is very clearly the fact that kids are taken to Indian local content we have creating. The trend seems to continue because we have got success stories on our own franchise to talk about when we started with Motu Patlu and then we have Pakdam Pakdai and now we have Shiva. So, you should watch out for more of them . We are storytellers, content makers and we would continue to invest in that part of the business big time. That’s really the trend from a perspective to say that, there Indian local content, which is now being extended beyond series into movies. Kid movies made for television making into the hearts of our kids; to me is another big trend. A trend I would look at from the adsales perspective would be to say that there are big takers and brands are now looking forward to it. They look at customisation, integration and in show placements to get the access and their brand out there for kids to see and consume. Another trend is that the ecosystems for kids’ franchises are really growing. We have made big moves into consumer products and we have grown from 25 to 40 categories today and the whole back to school range that’s going to launch this summer. So, a consumer product is something that will only grow as characters and character affinities grow. Kids will like to have consumer products of those characters. We see a lot of potential there and of course the affinity towards brands and characters as well and we have got into licensing in a big way. We had Britannia and Tiger biscuits doing it with Ninja, McVities with MotuPatlu. So, we have partnered with Boost as well and their licensing as well, Mother Dairy has also come on board. There is the trend of this ecosystem going beyond television. I think it’s growing into all forms of engagement. We are also looking into digital. The Shiva digital games have already got 1.5 million game plays in a couple of months that we launched. Digital is creating a lot of engagement for marketeers. We are able to engage our toons beyond television in digital as well. So, that’s a new trend. All these trends have potential which will grow.
How has been the acceptance of Nick amongst rural audiences Vs urban
Typically, the category gets about 65% of its ratings from urban and 35% of their ratings from rural. And that trend is very significant which says that pretty much tells us that the content which we have in the channel today is appealing across a different tiers of market s and different markets as well. Even in urban we do as well in 0.1 million as we do in megacities as we do now in rural. And, because of the fact that we now have English, Hindi, Tamil and Telegu dubs which has actually been able to penetrate and we do get 35% of our ratings from the rural market. That’s how appealing the content is to every child in the country today.
The success of any business is viewed in terms of revenues. Please do talk us through that.
Topline has really grown. Ad sales for Nick have really grown. The top line yield has grown by 40%. Sonic has also grown by significant leaps and bounds. There are lot of people who have sampled the channel and have now brought it into their consideration. 35% growth on the total top line is a great success story and how well we have been able to monetize the number one position. That growth has come in the period of two years. Subsequent in two years we have grown our Ad sales and top line and profits as well. A profitable growing business along with growing viewership as well.
What about audience engagement drives? How have those panned out
Fantastically well. We have over 1000 touch points in the year, we do a lot of stuff outside of television and digital as well which is more or less in terms of mall activation, we do many school programmes in the year. In fact for the summer campaign, we have partnered with retail outlets to ensure that the partnership goes forward. We have partnered with Pantaloons on their stores, Fun City which is a gaming zone, with McDonalds, with malls to do meet-and-greets, so and so forth. This year, we have partnered with National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) for its kids fiesta. Every year they do kids plays and workshops and this year, our toons are a part of their syllabi and meet and greet. All of these gives us a lot of touch, feel and play because it’s about a character you watch on TV and when it comes out of TV there is this whole tangablisation of the character which is what engagement gives us.
What are the plans for the year ahead and specifically for this summer?
We are going to move Shiva onto Sonic. Along with new episodes of Shiva on Sonic, we have new episodes of Pakdam Pakdai, new episodes of Shaun, the sheep and Supa Stikas, some of our very big shows. We would go outside of the network, in channels like Star, Zee and Sab to ensure that we create awareness about Shiva on Sonic. There is a big mass campaign for Shiva in summer, where there will be watch and wins. We will go to theatres as well. Big plan on Nick as well, it will see new episodes of Motu Patlu, new episodes of Ninja after very long and we are launching our 10th movie which is Motu Patlu in Double Trouble. We are doing van activation for Sonic as well. So, the vans go to Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns in 30 days, they do 20-25 cities. Lot of activity and action plan for summer.
The kids’ zone is very big on Voot. Will that be in sync with some of what you are already doing for your channels?
Voot and we are in a win- win position. They grow from us and we grow from them. Therefore, we have become the aggregators of a lot of good content between us and that’s really working for us as we can cross pollinate and we have the flexibility of using so much of the Intellectual Property (IP) that is our own. We can have the toons in the OTT (Over-the-top content) platforms which will only popularise them that much more.