Page 92 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

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“It’s All about Knowing Your Audience”

Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood

In April 2004 the Times of India began publishing a comic strip featuring two
characters named Hum and Tum. As soon became clear to readers across
the country, the comic strips were part of a marketing campaign for a film
produced and distributed by Yash Raj Films (Hum Tum, 2004, You and
Me, dir. Kunal Kohli). The marketing team at Yash Raj Films had, in what
seemed unusual at the time, been involved in the filmmaking process from
a very early stage and decided to build a campaign around the film’s pro-
tagonist, Karan Kapoor (Saif Ali Khan), who plays the role of a cartoonist in
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the film. As the comic strip became a topic of conversation, the marketing
team invited audiences in India and abroad to develop their own strips using
Hum and Tum and submit them to Yash Raj Films. The winning strips, it
was announced, would be integrated into the film. In addition to the comic
strips, Hum and Tum also featured prominently in television promotions
for the film. Woven into an otherwise standard promotion of various song
sequences from the film on music channels (such as MTV-India and Chan-
nel [V]) and general entertainment channels (such as Star Plus and ZEE),
the cartoons leant a measure of novelty to film marketing, a practice that had
never occupied a prominent position in the Bombay film industry. And on
May 27, 2004, a day before the worldwide release of the film, Saif Ali Khan
appeared as Karan Kapoor on Sony Entertainment Television’s popular tele-
vision program Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin (There Is No One Like Jassi), the Indian
adaptation of the Colombian telenovela, Yo Soy Betty La Fea. A year later, in
the fall of 2005, every film journalist, marketing executive, and public rela-
tions agent I spoke with in Bombay referenced Hum Tum as a key moment
for the film industry. Marketing, as one trade story put it, was the new man-
tra in Bollywood with Yash Raj Films, in its corporatized incarnation, lead-
ing the way. 2
“Until Hum Tum, we were doing vanilla stuff,” declared Tarun Tripathi,
the marketing manager at Yash Raj Films, when I met him in the offices of
Yash Raj Films in northwest Bombay. What did “vanilla” mean? “You know,
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