..for everyone concerned, is what the new ‘Idea Rocks India’ campaign looked like to me. Idea is taking Shaan to some 20 towns across India, and the contest is giving you the chance to be part of the tour – there is a Voice of Idea contest that allows the winner to sing with Shaan, there’s also a regular IRI contest that alllows winners to get passes for the event.
Idea is trying to evangelise the online media through at least two efforts here. Firstly, VOI is supposedly India’s first online singing contest. Participants have to enter their recordings online in normal formats. Then the normal process of voting. Secondly, guys who recharge online get a chance to win passes. Meanwhile, there’s also an on ground regular IRI contest which is driven through the mobile platform. While Idea builds brand salience through ground concerts and ets revenues out of the SMS based contest, what is interesting is that except for Delhi, all the others are non metros and tier 2 towns, using the net as a primary medium in such places is quite a good experiment.
Meanwhile, the entire stuff seems to be hosted on msn (while i saw the ad on yahoo :D). For MSN it is building new traffic as well as content. And what’s more, to listen to the songs one has to download Microsoft Silverlight. That, i thought, deserves a ‘Sirji, what an idea sirji’ 🙂
And lastly, for Mirchi and Zee, there’s the content. Additionally, for Zee, Shaan is a good draw and ‘Voice of Idea’ in particular is a good property to be part of, considering Star has ‘Voice of India’ which Shaan himself comperes. Whatte fun.
Interesting connection – Idea owns a property called Idea Star Singer on Asianet, which is now owned by Rajeev Chandrashekhar, who used to own BPL Mobile, whose only competitor in kerala initially used to be Escotel, which was picked up by Idea. 🙂
until next time, some ideologies do work