“Considering the growing popularity in the Hindi heartland, new box office releases from southern studios are planning to increase their marketing budgets considerably to widen their reach. As long as the Hindi audience’s hunger for entertaining films is satisfied, we will certainly see an increased focus on the Hindi market in the coming months," said Mitesh Kothari, co-founder and chief creative officer at digital agency White Rivers Media. The trend stems from the fact that films in southern languages have been making a mark in the Hindi market for the past few years with titles like Baahubali 2: The Conclusion and KGF: Chapter 2 have joined the list of highest-grossing films in Hindi, Kothari added.
Southern films that see dubbed releases across India are now, by default, looking at press interactions and multi-city tours starting with Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, Bengaluru and going on to Mumbai and Delhi, said Shahir Muneer, founder and director at Divo, a Chennai-based music and media company working on marketing campaigns of several such projects. “That, however, only provides the film visibility among audiences who consciously follow entertainment news. A lot of producers are now aggressively promoting the trailer through advertising on platforms like Google, Twitter and Facebook because the young, movie-going audience is primarily found on the digital medium," Muneer said. Many films are now collaborating with content and meme creators popular among Gen Z movie-goers. While not all southern films are investing on such a scale, those with the expectation to grab eyeballs in the Hindi market are definitely upping marketing budgets, Muneer said.
For a film made for Rs. 100 crore, producers would spend an additional Rs. 20-25 crore on marketing, entertainment industry experts say. “Marketing plays an important role in the success or failure of a movie. To get audiences to watch a movie, a marketing technique that is out of the box needs to be used," said Ashitosh Wadkar, producer - 4Dots Production, the content production vertical of digital marketing agency Optiminastic Media. Wadkar named the RRR strategy to collaborate with multiplex chain PVR Cinemas in order to launch NFTs and for the theatre chain to be branded as PVRRR for a few months, as one that caught audience attention. The other big strategy of appearing on reality shows is driven by their high ratings and that fact that they are often hosted by popular celebrities known across geographies, he added.
While marketing campaigns of southern film are yet to reach small towns and interiors of the Hindi-speaking belt, there is no way the north Indian market can be ignored, said Pratik Gupta, co-founder of Zoo Media and Pollen, an influencer marketing agency. “There is no set formula but we will definitely see more money (being pumped into campaigns) over time. Southern films have filled the void left by Bollywood of big commercial films and OTTs have brought them to the forefront," Gupta added.
