SAB TV: Family entertainment
SAB TV, the Sony channel which said ‘Asli Mazaa SAB Ke Saath Aata Hai’ (The more the merrier, with a pun on ‘SAB’) in 2008, is now talking about the result of its repositioning as a comedy channel for the entire family. Its new campaign says ‘Ab Bache Bache Ko Pata Hai Ki Asli Mazaa SAB Ke Saath Aata Hai’ (Even kids are aware of the brand’s promise). The channel, which had been wallowing with 19 gross rating points (GRPs, the sum of TV rating points) when Sony took it over from Shri Adhikari Brothers in 2005, is now at 134 GRPs.
The channel has come up with shows such as Taarak Mehta Ka Oolta Chasmah, Mrs & Mr Sharma Allahabadwale, Lapatagunj and Papad Pol which have returned high TV ratings of 1.5 to 3 (per cent of cable and satellite homes that watched its shows), according to TAM, the TV rating agency. With these primetime shows, the channel has usurped general entertainment channels such as NDTV Imagine and Star One to take the fifth slot. (Its channel share has increased from 3 per cent to 8.8 per cent).
The new campaign will extend the brand promise SAB had made. Most GECs are identified by some of their shows and audiences are prone to hop channels, chasing their favourite shows at different time slots. “Loyalty was only to the shows, not to the channel. We wanted to create a channel loyalty so that the entire line-up was viewed by the audience,” says SAB TV Executive Vice-president & Business Head Anooj Kapoor.
Sony had initially marketed SAB as a second-rung GEC channel targeted at the youth. Trying to do an MTV in the GEC space did not find favour with the audience. Another round of audience research later, SAB got it right in 2008. The insight SAB TV tapped into was that India still was largely a single-TV household where the housewife considers the primetime as the time to let her hair down and own the remote. Yet, the soaps were not watched by the men or children of the house. “We thought of offering programmes that would bring together all the three in front of the TV, without alienating the women,” says Kapoor.
SAB TV took the key elements of the daily soaps running on GECs: The strong female protagonists, linear storylines from Monday to Thursday (a first in comedy formats, which were sitcoms earlier), appointment viewing and joint families. But the team made the content light-hearted and played up the good in a joint family system (women were not antagonised by their mothers-in-law and there were no villains) for the family comedies. The skews for the channel improved as a result from 75 per cent male viewers to a more balanced inclusion of 48 per cent female viewers. The channel plans to organise 1,000 ‘Happy Housewives Club’ in 28 cities to let housewives display their talents and showcase them on the channel on Sundays.