With just a few days left for Christmas to begin and a new year to arrive, Viacom18’s kids cluster is all set with a big surprise package for the kids. New shows will be visible on its channels Nick, Nick Jr and Sonic from 20 December 2014.
To begin the festive mood, one of its popular shows, Pakdam Pakdai will be shifted from Nick to Sonic from 22 December at 7:00 pm with all new episodes. This is mainly being done to back Sonic’s tagline ‘Action ka Tevar with Comedy Ka Flavour’.
To add to this, the chase-comedy will also have a franchise extension, on the lines of Motu Patlu, with the first Pakdam Pakdai film called Pakdam Pakdai – Don v/s Billiman on 25 December on Sonic at 11:30 am.
The other big news is the return of Oggy and the Cockroaches to Nickelodeon from 1 January 2015 in an all new avatar and new episodes. The channel has acquired the rights to the show for four years after being taken by Cartoon Network in between 2012 and 2014. A huge on-air promotion drive has begun to propagate about this channel change called ‘made for each other’ and 65 episodes have already been canned. One of the main reasons to shift the chase comedy is to balance out the strong brands on channels with Oggy coming on board Nick to compliment Motu Patlu and Ninja Hatori.
Building on the Motu Patlu brand, the fifth movie from the franchise will air on 26 January 2015 called Motu Patlu Aur Khazane Ki Race. The previous movie – Motu Patlu Kungfu Kings – garnered 777 TVTs. A new range of shows will grace Sonic along with Pakdam Pakdai, which includes The Jungle Bunch, Mini Ninja, Rimba Racer and The Daltons. Nick is also coming up with new seasons of Motu Patlu and Ninja Hatori.
“We lost our top position when we lost the licence for Oggy and we were left with only Ninja Hatori. We have now got it back and will be aggressively promoting it. We are trying to build a portfolio that relates to children at every level by creating relevant Indian environment around the characters. Pakdam Pakdai will only be on Sonic because we don’t want to dilute the franchise,” says Viacom18 EVP and business head kids cluster Nina Elavia Jaipuria.
She also highlighted that for the period between April to November 2013 and April to November 2014, the ratings of Sonic had grown from 19 TVTs to 62 TVTs while for Nick it had grown by about 21 per cent (TAM data CS ABC 4-14). For November 2014, about 44 per cent of the ratings came from Motu Patlu, 43 per cent from Ninja Hatori and 9 per cent from Pakdam Pakdai.
Pakdam Pakdai has already been syndicated to countries such as Malaysia (RTM), Indonesia (MNC), Thailand (True TV), France and Germany (Arte), Middle East (MBC), CIS (Multi Mania and Nemo) and Israel (Talit Media).
Viacom18 plans to have nearly four to five movies of its franchise per year and will in the future look at taking them to the silver screen as well and if possible even a theme park around it. According to the Small Wonder study by Ormax Media, Motu Patlu, Ninja Hatori and Power Rangers figure in its list of top 10 characters.
This Christmas, special activities are planned on Nick and Sonic with special Santa figures for the different target audiences. ‘Lift your gift’ on Nick and ‘Sci-Fi Santa Contest’ on Sonic is giving away cool gifts every day. For the upcoming months, each channel will associate itself with certain days. Nick will celebrate Happy Holi and The Big Green Help, while Sonic will celebrate Republic Day and Teen Nick will have Valentoon on Valentine’s Day.
Some of its recent activities also saw a lot of visibility including Nickelodeon ‘Be the Boss’ which saw nearly 21,000 entries, out of which seven were selected and Sonic’s ‘Meet the Rangers’ in USA where the winners will soon be traveling for the same.
The cluster has also started delving into in-show placements of brands/advertisers. Product licensing has been done with Rings and Diamond packs for placing Motu Patlu on the packets, a tie up with Dominoes allows one toy to be given away with a Joy box and placing of Horlicks as a brand inside Motu Patlu. More such plans are in progress in the new upcoming episodes.
2014 also saw the three channels get nearly 20-30 new advertisers including Snapdeal, OLX, LG, Samsung, Hitachi, Godrej and Gionee. E-commerce companies were the biggest new entrants. This, along with restriction of on-air advertising time limit to just 12 minutes in an hour led to them hiking ad rates by about 25 to 30 per cent in turn leading to a 14 per cent growth of ad sales in April-November 2014 period as compared to April-November 2013.
While Jaipuria didn’t reveal much about new shows being produced, she did hint to expect some fresh ones next year.