• Ghajini
• Dev D
• Tata Nano
• The President is coming

and it just occurred to me to make the pdfs of all these case studies available as a compressed version, hence this post

Click Here to download the rar file containing pdfs of all the four case studies.

I often do Google ego searches about my name and key words that should point to some post(s) that I wrote. The results tend to range from Awesome to WTF, depending on where my entry stands in the search engine results page.

I did a Google search for some keywords/phrases and was happy to find links to my post among top 15 results. Find the keywords and the screenshots below

1) Keyphrase: “LK advani marketing” , # 11

Rank #11 in about 155,000 results. Read the post here

2) Keyphrase: “Dev D Marketing” , ” marketing dev d”  # 3

Rank #3 in about 322,000 results, Read the post here

2) Keyphrase: “Marketing Ghajini” , # 1
Rank #1 in about 10900 results , Read the post here

Here’s a bonus video of SRK proclaiming he’s the God of Marketing

Dev D’s Album Cover

1)  Back(internal) side of the cover

Page One: This page is divided into three parts
1) Ring back/Caller tunes: This part gives you relevant codes for Airtel, Vodafone, Idea,Reliance, Tata Indicom, Virgin and Aircel
2) Ring back tunes(BSNL): This part has relevant codes for BSNL.
3) Theme: This part has the code to download movie theme.

Page Two: This page is divided into seven parts
1) Animations
2) Color Logo
3) Wallpapers
4) Buy songs(hungama mobile)
5) Listen to songs: You can listen to full songs from any of these providers, Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, Reliance and Virgin
6) Download Ringtones from Airtel, Reliance, Tata Indicom, Idea, Vodafone, BSNL, wap.hungama.com
7) International Audience: Now people from US, Canada, UAE, Malaysia, UK and Mauritius can also download caller tunes, ring tones etc. This section has country specific details.

Chandni Chowk To China’s Album Cover

Actually this isn’t the album cover but this comes inside the album as a separate brochure.

Part one of the front side:

Part two of the front side: This part has codes to download dialer tunes from Tata Indicom, Airtel, Vodafone, Spice, Reliance, Idea and Aircel

Part one of Back side: This part is divided into four parts
1) Color Logo:
2) Animation
3) Wallpaper
4) Theme

Part two of the Back side: This part is for international audience to download ring tones etc. US, Canada, UAE, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and UK

Though I was never interested in “Chandni Chowk To China” and can’t ever compare it with “Dev D”, I loved their album cover/brochure a lot over the other. Here’s why
1) It’s a five page brochure as compared to two page one of Dev D.
2) It’s separate from the cover and therefore doesn’t need to be discovered by taking the album cover out from the cd case.
3) It’s designed and organized a lot better, thus way easier to read.
4) Also, I like the fact that they’ve made the ring tones available in two more neighboring markets i.e Pakistan and Bangladesh other than supporting an extra provider (Spice).

Though DEV D’s album has a free brochure containing stills of its cast I believe they should’ve used that space better. What do you think ?

Lustline:

Before you go any further, pick up your phone and dial 022-61424800. Just dial it for yourself and see what it is, trust me, it will be worth the call charges(if you are dialing from India)

Welcome. To proceed, please certify that you are above 18 by pressing one.
On pressing one, you are greeted by a husky voice that says
“If you want me in English today, press one. Agar hindi mein chahiye toh do dabaiye.”

Though what happens on pressing the next digit maybe disappointing for most callers as instead of talking(or hearing) anything naughty, all they get to hear is “to get an autographed cd of the film visit the website devdthefilm.com” or “to get a movie poster visit the website devdthefilm.com” , it’s a brilliant example of something that has never been tried before. If the lustline ever worked the way it was said to work it’s great but even if it never really worked that way it opens a whole new world of interactive marketing. The possibilities of using phone and sms lines for involving masses are immense and hopefully, we would soon be seeing more being done on these lines.

Website:

You have to certify that you are above 18 to view the site, interesting.
The lustline is also available on film’s website, where again you need to certify  that you are above 18 by and select a language to get going. Though I couldn’t really get past this stage all thanks to the awfully slow site. I still don’t get why all the film websites are made in flash, other than poor SEO they all take ages to load, spoiling the whole experience but alas no one really takes note of what people are saying about these things online( see month old rants here).

Though only a few sections are working, the all red site looks intriguing just like its trailers. I liked the community links section and the fact that it has links to 10 external web properties but the site could have been a lot better and engaging(engagement is almost zero).

Videos:

I am not really a TV person, so I rely on the web for updates on what’s new on the idiot box but if you are not like me chances are that must have come across

This song was uploaded on YouTube under the official UTVMotionPictures channel three weeks back and has got about 25,000 views while the official trailer uploaded two months back has been seen more than 59,000 times and has got about 117 comments, not bad at all.Not only this, UTV folks have been regularly uploading a minute long videos of the film songs every 7-10 days with the last one uploaded yesterday. Since the movie contains 18 songs, they can easily upload 10 songs without worrying too much. These videos have got almost 1,00,000 hits in total.

Abhay Deol gets tattooed

Audio:
The films music is also available via streaming at BollywoodHungama. Anyone who listens to the songs of the film will definitely talk about it and thus spread the word. Some like me, may decide to buy the audio cd too. These songs have been listened more than 25,000 times already.

(M)TV:

After reading this nicely written piece on passionforcinema I tuned to MTV and as mentioned their tickr is full of “atyachar”. What happens if you are pretending to be working in office when you are actually playing games ? Professional atyachaar etc etc. It’s another nice way to spread the word(like I just did). There are film promos playing every 5 minutes across the news channels, even if you want you cannot miss them.

Facebook:
An active official group with 920 members as of now, 7 videos, 86 stills from the film. The good thing about the group is that it’s regularly updated and admins are also participating in it.
An active  fan page which is also heavy on content. The film has 686 fans already.
There’s also an event about Dev D’s tattoo launch. This is an interesting way of involving online audience into offline activities.
Translate the lyrics contest: There’s also a contest to translate emosanal atyachar into English & get an autographed CD

Things definitely seem to be in the right direction as far as facebook is concerned.

Other social networks(Fishing where the fish are):
Not on facebook but want to join the film group, no problem. The film has official groups/communities on orkut (176 members), perfspot (137 members), hi5 (30 members), fropper (26 members), 
bigadda (16 members) and goyaar (10 members).

It’s worth mentioning that despite the size of the group/community the information and content is same across all these groups and apparently there are profiles of some of the cast and team members also on most of the platforms covered.

PFC:
passionforcinema is the biggest platform for Hindi film buffs and lots of experts in the field blog there. Anurag being an active blogger at PFC has written a lot of the film and engaged with his readers. There are lots of other posts written by other folks about the film.These posts must have easily got more than 10,000 views. There’s also a deleted scene video from the film exclusively for PFC which is certainly a great idea.

Controversy:
Nothing works better for making noise than a planned or accidental controversy. Dev D also has its share of controversy in the claims the film has reignited the infamous DPS mms scandal.

Merchandise:
Not sure if it’s the right category but if news sources are to be believed there are plans to launch
“Dev D Condoms”. If they pull of this one, it will be an historic(not necessarily successful) tactic, which will create a lot of buzz and be a remarkable event in marketing of bollywood films.

The marketing strategy for the film includes both offline and online activities, while Ghajini’s online marketing was more focused on stand alone sites, it’s focused more on social networks in the case of Dev D and apparently it has got to do with the fact that the producer of the film is UTVSpotboy. Apparently, they have a platform and a methodology which is used to promote their films. Given the rate at which buzz is spreading for the film and the fact that its release is about three weeks away chances are it will see a grand opening. Lets see if they come up with something else till the release date and how the movie performs.

Update: You can also download the case study in pdf format here