Tanaaz Bhatia, Founder and MD of Bottomline Media, has opened up about how to find the perfect brand integrations for movies.
In a recent episode of Aleena Dissects, she gave viewers a behind-the-scenes look into the tightrope experts have to walk when it comes to balancing cinematic entertainment with promotional advertisements.
“What a director thinks isn’t always what a brand wants to get integrated,” she revealed. “It has to work from an ROI (Return on Investment) perspective.”
“Even if you do a passing hoarding at the back, it has to have some stay, or some logic that it will register to the person. So whenever I sit on it, I read the script, I work with the AD and the Director to understand, and then we kind of integrate the brands. It helps because the brands tell you want they want.”
However, brand integrations aren’t always so straightforward. Taking a trip down memory lane, Tanaz revealed what “probably one of the worst placements” she had ever done.
“[It] was my first movie ever,” she recalled. “It was a film called Always Kabhi Kabhi. If you Google the ‘Worst Film in Film Placement’, you’ll find it.”
When asked why she believed the brand placement was so lacking, Tanaz gave an unexpected answer.
“I integrated an entire ad of a brand into the movie,” she revealed. “It was horrible. I had the animated characters, I had it transcend into the actors – it was really bad.”
Despite this, the integration idea was ultimately successful for the movie.
“I did more than 18 brands in it,” she said. “I raised lots of money for them. So that was how I started working with Red Chillies.”
Since then, Tanaaz Bhatia’s record of brand integrations has been phenomenal. She has now worked with several megastars in India’s entertainment industry, from Shah Rukh Khan in movies like Ra.One to Gauri Khan for an AirBnB campaign to Manish Malhotra for Caprese’s festive season campaign.
However, the nature of marketing and brand integrations has evolved a great deal since the beginning of her journey. In particular, Tanaaz revealed that a massive change was sparked from around the time of Covid19.
“Digital marketing came about, and lots of influencers came about,” she explained. “People started investing more in getting creators to talk about the brand directly rather than indirectly integrating it into a movie. That was when we saw a shift.”
For a few years, most brands stopped doing in-film integrations altogether. However, they have now begun relying on the original marketing approach once again, realizing that this is how you reach the masses and get to the crux of the audience across all-tier cities in India.
However, brands also have greater flexibility to choose different type of promotional methods depending on the movie, from Fighter to Jolly LLB to Student of the Year.
“It depends on the niche on where you are at,” Tanaaz concluded.
However, these were not Tanaaz Bhatia’s only revelations this episode. Sitting down with Aleena, founder and CEO of Social Media Dissect, she dives deep the chaotic world of brand integrations, from complex budgeting to the different ways to handling a crisis to a prediction on where the industry is currently headed. She also opened up about her own experiences of working in the film industry with megastars, adding a unique marketing angle to her observations.
For more details, watch the full Aleena Dissects podcast episode here:
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