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Marketing An Unorthodox Film

To A Traditional Society Using

New-Age Technology

Abhilash Surendran PGDBA 2007

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Introduction “Devdas” was Sarathchandra Chatterjee’s tragic Bengali novella featuring the self-destructive Devdas, his childhood lover Paro, and the prostitute Chandramukhi. This immortal novel, written circa 1917 has had an immense impact on the psyche of the love-lost Indian man, and thus, on Indian films itself. No other story has been remade so many times in Indian cinema. The story has seen a multitude of adaptations by a wide spectrum of directors. In the pre-war era, P.C.Barua made the movie in Bengali, Hindi and Assamese, even going to the extent of playing the title role himself in the Bengali version. In 1955, the story was filmed again using modern cinematic techniques by Bimal Roy, and Dilip Kumar played the protagonist. 1979 and 2002 saw 2 Bengali versions of the story, first by Dilip Roy, and then by Shakti Samantha. 2002 also saw the most extravagant Devdas ever, with Sanjay Leela Bhansali filming the first color film version of the story in Hindi. At the time of its release, it was the most expensive Bollywood film ever produced, with a reported budget of Rs. 50 crores. With opulent sets and castles, and an A-list star-cast of actors like Shahrukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit, ‘Devdas’ made the tragic hero become a sort of icon among the youth. In fact, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee is once believed to have told his friends that if only he had visualized the negative impact that his book was going to have on the youth, he would not have permitted it to be filmed at all. Well, he never knew what was going to come in 2009. Dev.D – An overview Dev.D released on February 6, 2009. Anuraag Kashyap, the les enfant terrible of Indian cinema, had earlier made path-breaking films like ‘No Smoking’ and ‘Black Friday’, and was also the scriptwriter of many of Ram Gopal Verma’s famous works, like ‘Satya’ and ‘shool’. But no one was prepared for his interpretation of the famous Bengali novella. He took the character of Devdas to a new self-pitying low, characterizing it by excesses of drug addiction and dysfunctionality. The character of Paro was transformed into a contradictory blend of tradition and modernity, the type who fits into the family girl mould as easily as she sends a naked picture of hers through email to her boyfriend. And the character of Chadramukhi moved on from a traditional courtesan to a post-modern school girl who ends up in a pink boudoir as a prostitute, the result of an MMS scandal.

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Rewriting the technique of the artistic medium, the film was marked by unusual cinematography, dizzy editing, non-linear plot narration, obscene dialogues and a bizarre audio track comprising 18 songs of all different genres. This film challenged tradition; provided a new perspective on a story that had been told umpteen times before. So, the most important question for UTV, the distributors of the movie, was – how do we market this film in a country and society as traditional as ours? And that is exactly what this case study looks to present, as the film used novel marketing ideas and social media techniques which were rarely used before in the Bollywood landscape. If the film was path-breaking, the marketing efforts for it, matched it for each step. Market Overview January and February of every year are particularly important months for Bollywood. Traditionally, a lot of Bollywood films are released in these months, and market pundits acknowledge that the movies released in the first 2 months, shape the Bollywood distribution strategy for the rest of the year. In 2009, specifically, there were a lot of big budget films stated to be released in the opening months, like "Chandni Chowk to China", "Delhi 6", "Dev D" and "Billu Barber". With such a flurry of high-quality films with a superior starcast, there's going to be a lot of competition to seek people's attention and get noticed. The marketing teams behind each film would try everything they can to spread the buzz and build a sense of urgency to watch the film. In the case of “Dev D”, this competition has to be intensified because the film lacks an A-list starcast, features a debutant music director, was made keeping in mind a very niche audience, and has to be marketed specifically to that niche audience. Let’s see how folks behind "Dev D" went about their marketing. Marketing Challenges For a film with not too many backers, “Dev D” had its own share of marketing challenges that had to be addressed before any actual marketing initiatives were to be undertaken.

σ Identifying a potential market that can relate to the view of post-globalization India as presented in the movie

σ Ensuring that the marketing efforts for the movie do not give away much about the movie itself, keeping enthusiasm and excitement intact.

σ Keeping the marketing racy, to ensure interest among the youth, while ensuring that all marketing efforts stay within the accepted legal and social norms.

σ Identifying new marketing avenues to reach out to the specific market groups.

σ If the interest in the movie is to be maintained, the marketing efforts have to be novel and innovative.

σ To avoid too much of a hullabaloo over the taboo nature of the movie, the marketing will have to be broadly viral, and adopting more word-of-mouth promotion. In short, this film cannot go the ‘hoarding-advertisement’ mode.

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Market Identification For UTV, the distributors of the movie, the first and foremost task was to identify the potential market they were trying to reach. The identifiable attributes of the market reach included:

σ A progressive youth diasporas with an urban outlook

σ Aged 20-something and with a broad view of cultural diversity

σ People who can relate to the state of disturbed globalization as mentioned in the movie

σ City dwellers

σ Fad seekers

σ Genuine movie connoisseurs

σ Though unethical, teenagers who fall under the “sex sells” market category A bunch of Marching Ants can help for starters The march of technology has ensured that Bollywood slowly gave up hand-painted posters for digital ones, thus ushering the golden age of poster design. This change has coincided with the entry of small design houses and advertising firms in the film industry. For Dev.D, Anuraag Kashyap was trying to refract Saratchandra Chatterjee's Devdas through a prism of amphetamines and sex, and the posters had to be equally psychedelic to induce the same feeling that one would get on watching the film. While the film has got a mixed response, few will deny that its psychedelic posters would make excellent wall accessories. They were designed by Kailash Nayak of the advertising agency Marching Ants. He imagined the film as a "romance with a feel of lust’’. Before coming up with Dev.D's Aviators and lips poster and the illustration of Abhay Deol that's given a Rorschach test effect, Nayak studied the covers of albums by Pink Floyd and The Doors.

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Lustline “Sex sells.”

- Jef I Richards.

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) For a nation where sex is still a taboo subject, to have a number tentatively named lustline, by itself piques interest and excitement. On dialing the lustline, the first thing you hear is: “Welcome. To proceed, please certify that you are above 18 by pressing one.” On pressing one, you are greeted by the husky voice of Kalki Koechlin, who plays Chandramukhi in the film, who says: "If you want me in English today, press one. Agar Hindi mein chahiye toh do dabaiye."

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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" (http://devdthefilm.com/), it's a brilliant example of something that has never been tried before. Especially for a movie of Dev D's profile – where lust, sex and love play upon the characters – this is an apt campaign that suits the mood and flavor of the film. 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 Note: The website is no longer available (previously hosted on http://devdthefilm.com)

The first thing that strikes you when you enter the website is the notification that “you have to certify that you are above 18 to view the site.” Interesting. Such a notification tickles the adolescent reader into trying the site further, even if he is not 18.

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The lustline is also available on the film's website in the form of a dirty chat window, where again you need to certify that you are above 18 by and select a language to get going. The colorful flash designs made the site very enticing, but on the downside, there was too much relying on heavy flash content, which made the site really slow in loading. Though only a few sections of the website were working, the all red site looks intriguing just like its trailers. Some positive points were the community links section and the fact that it had links to 10 external web properties but the site could have been a lot better and engaging. One of the minor misses was that engagement is almost zero when it comes to the website usage. Mobile Game Anuraag Kashyap, director of Dev D, opined that since youth is the key audience for the film, the film crew has decided to explore all new interests of youngsters. And this included gaming.UTV and Indiagames launched a new mobile game Dev D based around the movie. In this game, the player gets to play Dev, the protagonist who is out on quest to convince Chanda to get back to him. The game starts with the situation after Dev D-Chanda split and Dev D's quest which ends when he reaches Chanda's room. During the journey, Dev goes to pubs and bars; plays darts and other games to win money and bribe to guards to finally reach Chanda's room. The mobile game is set priced at Rs. 99, pretty reasonable for a set-piece mobile game in the Indian market. Commenting on the Dev D game Vishal Gondal, CEO of Indiagames said, “Dev D being a youth-oriented movie has the perfect extension in gaming. It is the way to captivate Indian youth. With creativity, interactivity and a story-oriented game play, Dev D will be a great hit with audiences.”

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Innovative Premiere Invite With Dev D, Bollywood has witnessed all kinds of new promotional strategies and campaigns. Initially, the team introduced Lustline – a phone line over which adults can call and hear Chanda talk dirty to them. Then, they launched the Dev D Mobile Game to entertain viewers and attract them into the story of the protagonist Dev. But the invitation for the premiere of the movie has been the most rebellious. Every invitation card had a condom packed with it!! This was done to in keeping up with the plot of the movie, say the makers. Invitees were taken aback by this outrageous promo. How far can a Bollywood movie's promos go? As far as packing condoms in premiere invites, say the makers of Dev D. This promo, says the crew, is to stick to the theme of the film. Director Anuraag Kashyap and UTV Spotboy seem to be trying every other angle to lure viewers into the mood and theme of the film. After all, the tagline for the movie is “Come fall in lust”.

Videos Obviously, we live in times where most of the urban, 20-somethings rely more on the web for updates on what's new on the idiot box. The marketing minds behind Dev D must have recognized this fact, because apart from the traditional exposure that the movie received on music channels, “Dev D” was heavily marketed on the internet also.

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Idiot box or intelligent box, chances are that you must have come across the song “Emosional Atyachar” from the movie. This song was uploaded on YouTube under the official UTVMotionPictures channel, http://in.youtube.com/user/UTVMotionPictures and got about 25,000 views in just 3 weeks. The song currently has 113,441 views. The official trailer http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=FRLjycn11Rw uploaded two months before release has been seen more than 212,000 times and has got about 235 comments, not bad at all. Not only this, UTV folks kept regularly uploading minute long videos of the film songs every 7-10 days. Since the movie contains 18 songs, this gave them plenty of mileage on YouTube. ‘Word-of-blog’ publicity These videos http://in.youtube.com/profile?user=UTVMotionPictures&view=videos have got almost 10,00,000 hits in total. But much more important to the film is the free viral marketing that it received through ‘word-of-blog’ publicity that was doing the rounds. The citizens of the Indian blogosphere took to Dev D like anything. A study of internet trends using Google's free application, Google trends (http://trends.google.com) reveals that internet activity peaked for the search term “Dev D” exactly during the month of February 2009, when the movie was being released.

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Now let’s try another search for all blog pages which had the term Dev D, and were published between November 2008 and 6th February 2009. This determines the pre-release hype for any movie on the blogosphere. You can use Google’s blog search application (http://blogsearch.google.com) and sort the results by date to get the number of pages that were released during this time and spoke about the movie. You will be amazed by the results

In the 4 months before the release of the movie, there were 175570 new blog pages that were published which had a reference to the movie. That is an astonishing number, when you consider that, for “Delhi 6”, another Bollywood movie released around the same time, there were only 140,000 new pages during the same period. This was despite the fact that Delhi 6 had an A-list starcast, established director and music from the maestro A.R. Rahman himself. Audio: The soundtrack album of Dev D contains no less than 18 songs. While the songs range from grunge rock (Emotional attyachar) to folk (Hikknaal), one thing is certain about the music – this one transcends genres. But the challenge again was Amit Trivedi, a music director who was relatively new to the Bollywood scene. This meant that the music would have to be given the appropriate exposure and advertising required to make it popular among movie goers.

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To give more exposure to the films music before its release, it was made available via streaming at BollywoodHungama. http://www.bollywoodhungama.com/movies/audiolisting/13812/index.html Anyone who listens to the songs of the film will definitely talk about it and thus spread the word, making it an excellent viral marketing technique. These songs were listened more than 25,000 times in their first week itself. And the viral marketing resulted in increased sales of the audio CD for the movie. (M)TV Ticker: One of the buzzwords for the whole Dev D promotional campaign, has been ‘emosanal attyachar’, which is just a hinglish way of saying Emotional Attyachar. UTV and Anuraag Kashyap hit a lucky jackpot when MTV took up the word ‘attyachar’ for their screen tickers. If you watched MTV in those days, all they talked (in their Tickr) about was atyachaar. Various kinds of it. What happens if Satyam closes down? Financial atyachaar. What happens if your daily horoscope lets you down? Astrological atyachaar. So on & so forth. Facebook: A lot has already been written already about how facebook shapes interactive marketing, and how social networking sites like facebook can be used for building momentum or interest in a specific project or idea. An active official group http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=33865259610 with 2080 members as of now, 14 videos, and 164 stills from the film. The good thing about the group is that it's regularly updated and the admins are also participating in it. There’s also an active fan page http://www.facebook.com/pages/DEV-D/49468711223?ref=s which is also heavy on content. The film has 16022 fans.

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Facebook Events There was a facebook event about Dev D's tattoo launch and other similar events http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=42378769790 . This is an interesting way of involving online audience into offline activities.

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There was also a contest to translate emosanal atyachar into English & get an autographed CD. http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=33865259610&topic=7622.

There was a Dev D t-shirt competition exactly on the date of the release, to keep the hype high among the web 2.0 generation of moviegoers. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=52722966882&index=1

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Other social networks (Fishing where the fish are) For those who were not on facebook, UTV had the bases covered there as well. The film has official groups/communities on orkut (http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=33865259610&topic=7622) (316 members), perfspot (http://www.perfspot.com/groups/group.asp?id=C9BD38D0-C2F5-4368-97F9-CB4C1AD929CD) (135 members), hi5 (http://www.hi5.com/friend/group/3821535--DEV.%2BD--front-html) (42 members), fropper (http://www.fropper.com/groups/devd) (26 members), bigadda (http://www.bigadda.com/adda/_view/20405) (45 members) and goyaar (http://www.goyaar.com/groups_profile.php?g_id=332) (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.com is the biggest platform for Hindi film buffs and lots of experts in the field blog on this site. Anuraag Kashyap being an active blogger at PFC has written a lot about the film and engaged with his readers. There are lots of other posts (http://passionforcinema.com/dev-d-ka-muzic-roz-bajaane-ka/) written by other folks about the film. These posts must have easily got more than 10,000 views. In fact, there are 10 reviews written on the site for the film, which include notable film-makers like Khalid Mohammed. This gave the movie an approval of intelligentsia, rather than being branded as an erotic or racy movie.

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Deleted Scenes A hype-building marketing activity which is rarely seen in Bollywood. Generally, no one cares about those scenes which are deleting from a movie for the sake of editing/trimming time. But in the case of Dev D, taking into consideration the controversial nature of the movie, it was known that releasing the deleted scenes from the movie would be a great way to build hype. Even after the movie was release. There's a deleted scene video http://passionforcinema.com/pfc-exclusive-devd-deleted-scene/ from the film exclusively for passionforcinema.com which is certainly a great idea.

Abhilash Surendran Reg # 200713335 PGDBA - 2007