Amazon Prime Video, one of India’s leading OTT services, was coming back with the second season of the Indian fan-favorite show, ‘Panchayat’. The first season amassed tremendous love from the audiences with its quirky storyline and concept.
And, the brand was all set to launch the second season. Considering the fact that the show built a very strong fandom during its first season, the objective with the launch of the second season was to create a recall, revive the fandom and engage with the fans. The aim was to make the audiences watch the second season too with the same enthusiasm.
And, as OTT show marketing has grown leaps and bounds in the past few years creating a plethora of shows, reaching the right set of audience with the right message and make your show stand ahead of the curve is of utmost importance.
We have observed the fact that generally, the fans need a recall of the season gone by to connect with the upcoming season of any show. Therefore, the challenge was to find a connecting element that would not only give a recall about season 1 but also help the audience look forward to the upcoming one. And the whole objective was clearly to revive the existing fandom and build recall along with populating our fans’ feeds with the ‘not so low key’ content. Along with all this, our main focus was also to create awareness for the brand.
Another challenge was to optimize and create a high impact for the audience to tune into that piece of content. And, this requires a highly innovative content marketing tactic.
Lauki (Bottle Gourd) has been a constant element throughout the two seasons of the show, critical in establishing several of the story’s themes. One character in the show is known to give a bottle gourd to everyone he meets as a gift, to get his work done in return. Through listening, we understood that this bottle gourd relevance appeared in several pop culture references after the release of the first season, which established its fondness among the audience. Using that insight, our strategy was to further build on this affinity by making lauki (bottle gourd) the hero of the campaign communication for Season 2.
Lauki (bottle gourd), a mere vegetable, took the entire screen and attention throughout the show’s previous season. So, all the activities revolved around bringing it into the limelight. The best way to ignite conversations and engagement is indeed to collaborate with celebrities, influencers and have everyone on the internet clamouring to get a selfie with lauki or cook with lauki (bottle gourd) and have constant chatter about lauki (bottle gourd).
Further, social media is regularly taken over by unique trends which the users love to engage with, the campaign leveraged the uniqueness of clicking selfies with a Bottle Gourd to spike the audience’s interest.
The campaign strategy also took into consideration that lauki (bottle gourd) is a very unique aspect of the show, and to anyone who hasn’t seen the first season, it helped incite the feeling of missing out (FOMO) and tugged them towards the show.
The lauki (bottle gourd) became an overnight sensation as more than 5000 people clicked selfies with it and posted them on their social media handles. Each garnered a minimum reach of 1000 people, making the campaign successfully reach 8.22 million people, garnering around 5.5k mentions and more than 11M impressions.
