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Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood >> 97

runs across all channels, how do we distinguish ourselves? So the promos,
imagery, marketing, the catch phrases, lines, VJs . . . the whole mix. It was
a way to dovetail cool with Bollywood (my emphasis).

During the mid-to-late 1990s, the search for “cool” was the marketing chal-
lenge worldwide and the Indian media marketplace was no exception. 39
And for MTV-India, aligning itself with what was considered “cool” by
a majority of Indian youth clearly meant rethinking its position on Hindi
film music as well as an emergent Indian pop music scene. Beginning in
1997–98 with a clear mandate to forge ties with the film industry, MTV-
India executives began initiating conversations with a range of producers
and directors in the Hindi film industry. According to George and other
music channel executives I spoke with, it took well over two years before
the film industry began responding to television executives’ overtures. 40
Vikram Sathaye, who worked closely with George during this period, also
pointed out that until this time the film industry saw no reason to forge
links with television channels:

If you were a Yash Chopra, why would you need a music channel’s 10 mil-
lion viewers? You would go to a general entertainment channel, but even
then . . . all that would happen was the channels would get a few songs
from a film like DDLJ or Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, the songs would be part of
a few countdown shows and placed on rotation on MTV. No effort. We
would ask Yash Chopra for the songs and he would say theek hai (alright),
you’re a TV channel, here are the songs. And at the time, no one was aware
of how payments would work. So it was all very informal. But music com-
panies played a role—if I was Sony or T-Series, it was in my interest to
promote the songs. Yash Raj had sold the rights to these companies. So we
came to recognize the fact that if we were to drive programming and get
people to watch our channel with Bollywood content, then we would have
to go talk to producers and directors. We would have to say, we’ll do this
exclusive for you, give us an interview with, say, Akshay Kumar. Or can
Akshay Kumar do a special show with Cyrus Broacha, let’s say.

To be sure, film producers were keenly aware of the popularity of film music-
based shows, Top Ten countdowns in particular, and television companies’
struggles with ratings and attempts to define audience shares. Within a few
months of the launch of countdown shows on television channels, includ-
ing Doordarshan (Superhit Muqabla), ZEE TV (Philips Top Ten), and MTV-
India (BPL Oye), arguments broke out about the techniques used to rank