When Kolaveri went mega-viral, it was obvious that it would be followed by 2 or 3 more such ‘making-of’ videos shot in the studio with the hero and composer jamming ‘seemingly’ naturally. I was expecting it in Tamil, but it looks like the immediate next Kolaveri would be in Telugu.
If you go by Southern composer SS Thaman’s tweets, he has the theme song of the upcoming Mahesh Babu starrer, The Businessman, ready for the Kolaveri-style makeover. This is supposed to be the first ever song Mahesh Babu is singing, as per news reports – the song has rap and dialogs by Mahesh Babu, it seems. Thaman goes to great extent assuring his readers that they had planned it long before Kolaveri happened and that they are not competing with Kolaveri.
The news is Business Man will have our superstar prince and puri Gaaru singing for the theme of the film …it’s gonna rock the world 🙂
The song will have the making video toooooo so it’s gonna be crazyyyy 🙂
We shall show who we r with our power This song will NOT have any flavour of kolaveri this is gonna be our super star prince song guys 🙂
I am clarifying once again tat there is nothing to compete with kolaveri or beat it .We planned this voice session even before this kolaveri
So pls don’t compare businessman with kolaveri and it’s totally in a different genre it’s an attitude song and theme of the film 🙂
It has got mind blowing dialogues and rap lines and very good beats ..it is the theme of businessman 🙂 so pls stop comparing with kolaveri
Now, I’m quite sure the media in Andhra Pradesh would be excited with the prospects of the next Kolaveri happening out of their state and it may also get some national exposure coming close on the heels of Kolaveri and the fact that it has Mahesh Babu, one of the most successful actors from Andhra Pradesh. His last film Dookudu made global news when it collected some humongous amount even in the US and was being considered for a remake by Sallu Bhai (Oh sorry, we can’t call him that anymore – he doesn’t get girls, as a result)…Salman Khan, till he decided that there’s only so many cop roles he can do. In fact, Andhra TV channels are already hailing this theme as the next Kolaveri – if you understand a bit of Telugu, here’s TV9 speculating on this piece of news.
So there, let’s see how far the next Kolaveri, from The Businessman goes. There is a reason why I’m even bothered to write about it considering we haven’t even heard the song or seen the video on question.
If you read the comments in the Kolaveri story in Medianama, you’d notice a couple of comments from Prashanth Challapalli, head of Jack In The Box, the agency that handles content, seeding and analytics, in his own words, for Sony Music, India.
His comment clearly explains a few behind-the-scenes work on Kolaveri’s success, but not all.
He says,
there was no campaign. It was just a video we got from Sony and we really liked it. So we said, if we like it, so might a bunch of other people on the net especially because we are a Mumbai based company with different people from all over the country and all of us liked the song even though we all didn’t understand the lyrics fully.
One of the main reasons – besides the instantly catchy tune, of course – why I believe the song worked was the subtitled lyrics of the already-in-English song (hardly Tamil, if you notice!). The other reasons, of course, include, using such basic Tanglish (Tamil-style English) with a self-effacing style that helps the tune reach out to a wider audience base beyond Tamil Nadu. After all, we’re in a country where language is a major deterrent for people in one state to listen to the music of another state!
From what I read from Prashanth’s comment, I don’t get which agency/person decided to add the lyrics for an online video, an effort that is usually restricted only to TV and rarely for YouTube special material, at least in India. Reason? Simple – it is a question of investment and it was traditionally believed that television offers some return on money invested for producing a video with any/minimal effects like professional subtitling, editing and so on. YouTube premieres were considered an after thought after the song has hit the television channels.
Prashanth’s comment also doesn’t say anything about whether Kolaveri was orchestrated as a seed/viral (brilliant promotional tactic) or if it caught on the collective imagination on its own (wonderful, welcome fluke). They perhaps did orchestrate it in some way – perhaps planned seeding it with a few influential online folks or with mainstream media and then it took on from there. But, for all practical purposes, it looked like the other way round from what unfolded after Sony premiered the song officially, after a leak.
There’s also no word in his comment on who decided to add the caller tune download number on the video – that’s another sign that the makers were fairly sure of its potential and planned well in advance to take advantage of it.
The point here is that Kolaveri-type successes may not necessarily happen by choice or design, but there are signs (like subtitling of the lyrics and caller tune code) that points to some assured thought behind an online-only promotional tactic.
Roopak Saluja, co-founder and managing director, Bang Bang Films and Jack in the Box Worldwide, perhaps says it better, in this Campaign India interview,
â??You don’t ever create a viral. Content is either worthy of going viral or it isn’t and that’s for other people to decide. What you do create are the conditions for propagation”.
The last line – creating conditions for propagation – is the key point I’m trying to extract from Kolaveri’s success and looking forward to, in The Businessman’s single. There are quite a few things one can do to orchestrate a viral, if you’re confident about the quality of your material/content. Like,
- Mainstream PR on day zero, to start promoting it in influential print and TV media before the song hits the web. This is quite normal in PR – we do product seeding with influencers before products hit the market so that, there is a buzz on the day of the launch.
- Seeding the video with select online influencers – this helps in tipping the buzz in favor of the content on day one, the logic being, ‘If that celebrity I love likes the song, I may too! Oh…and I’m so gonna share it on Twitter and Facebook and look cool’.
- Paid spots online to promote the video in context – this is usually a tactic adopted by brands who have a video that is less generic and more often screams the brand’s name of value explicitly. In such a case, the content is questionable unless the brand plug is done appropriately.
- Is the content associated with or tying with something already topical? For instance, when Anna Hazare was the buzz of the nation a few months back, there were a couple of virals that were produced to capitalize on that craze. Kolaveri is a standalone piece of content, however!
So there – content is king, but content promotion is the queen and without the queen, the king is bound to be mighty lonely! I’d love to see how good Thaman and Mahesh Babu’s content is and what the record label behind The Businessman’s soundtrack does to orchestrate a potential viral and the kind of effort they take, over and above Kolaveri, to make it seem different considering it is arriving so close to Kolaveri’s massive success.
Photo courtesy, Soundbox Magazine.