Dancing To The Toon

THE strategy is as old as the air waves: launch an audience-interactive programme, offer the listeners or viewers a request show and broadcast the request with a mention of their names. Or better still, conjure up a road show, throw in a contest with a holiday to an exotic location as the prize, and watch listenership or television rating points soar—recipes for surefire success in the times of fleeting retention spans for television channels. And if the strategies are bunched together, as Cartoon Network, the 'cartoons-all-day' channel, has done as part of its Asia-wide promotion campaign, the results can only evoke animated delight. Both for the network and the viewers.

A month-long all-India campaign by Cartoon Network, CNN's sister channel from the Atlanta-based Turner International stable, that included an exclusive road show in Bangalore, ended last week. But responses continued to pour in days after the deadline for viewers to write into the network and dedicate their favourite cartoons to 'someone special' expired. Besides, for four days, Bangalore witnessed a toonvan—a van with colourful cartoon characters painted all over it—zip around town, stopping to film children requesting for a cartoon show. Requests that will be aired for a fortnight during the Christmas-New Year season. The write-in and filmed request responses proved that there certainly is an Indian viewership beyond Shanti and Baywatch, not to mention day-night cricket.

"We're absolutely thrilled with the response," says a delighted Bhaskar Pant, president, Turner International India. "We were expecting such a response, but one can never take it for granted till it actually happens." The campaign by the toon channel which celebrated its first birthday in India last October, attracted more than 40,000 requests from India alone with several coming in the form of filmed requests from Bangalore's toon-watchers. The response, according to Pant, constituted more than half the total requests from all over the Asia-Pacific region where the campaign was conducted. A big leap from the 20,000 Indian responses of the total 40,000 Asian responses to acontest during the network's birthday celebrations. While the October winner went to Los Angeles, the winner of the Give a Toon for Christmas competition will get an all-expenses-paid five-day 'tooned vacation' for four to Bali, Indonesia.

Bangalore was the only Indian city chosen for the roadshow—the other two cities being in Taiwan and the Philippines—which was the first time ever that Cartoon Network hit the road for a promotion campaign. While the network claims that about five million Indian cable TV households have access to the animation channel, Bangalore was chosen for strategic business reasons. "Bangalore is an important market in terms of children who watch Cartoon Network," explains Pant. "The viewership is cosmopolitan in nature and cable TV penetration is as high as 50 per cent." Besides, it specialises in marketing activity for children. Says he: "Places like Shoppers' Stop, Kids Kemp, Fun World and Cubbon Park illustrate the kind of areas available for Bangalore's children, making it a very attractive market for us. " Reasons such as these show that India offers the highest receptivity to the network in Asia.

 The success of the campaign has given a boost to the network's plans to make it commercially more viable, there are no plans yet to change the programming pattern of the only exclusive channel for children in India. Though some advertising of Asian products on the channel does exist, Cartoon Network has decided to solicit Indian advertisers in early 1997. That's just about the only change the network expects to make. No increase in the number of hours it is on air ("parents are thankful that we're not a 24-hour channel"). And no immediate plans to dub the toons into Hindi a la STAR Plus. Says Pant: "Many of our viewers don't want us to dub the cartoons. That's where niche marketing comes in, as the demographics of the audience we attract is more important to us than mere numbers." With the roadshow-cum-request campaign proving a loyal following for the channel exists, the network seems set to create a niche market, however limited, for itself in the days of dwindling fortunes for  satellite channels.