MTV India gets a face lift

As part of a repositioning strategy, Viacom's music channel MTV India is aiming to personalise its offerings conveyed through a fresh tagline 'My MTV.' This move will see the channel heavily infuse more non-music shows into the content mix for the channel and encourage further viewer interactivity.

MTV GM and VP creative and content Ashish Patil said, "MTV will now become personalized with our viewers and therefore our tagline becomes My MTV. Each of our new programs will be driven by viewers."

Elaborating on the new positioning Patil said, "Youngsters want more than just music. Our new shows will do that better for them."




Though the new shows extend the MTV youth offering further, music will still form 70 per cent of the programming mix.

MTV has lined up a slew of six new shows to breathe fresh life into the channel. It plans to gradually introduce these shows starting with the launch of crazysexycool.com which will kick off on 23 July. This half-hour weekly show will be hosted by VJs Rannvijay and Anousha who will travel all across the country and talk about the "craziest, sexiest and the coolest things that comes across." Viewers can even post their experiences which can be featured on the show.

Another affix to the line up is MTV It Sucks, a weekly offering hosted by Cyrus Sahukar. Speaking on it Patil said, "Cyrus will criticize anything that irritates people like open potholes or continuous telemarketing calls, in his typical funny style."

Cyrus will also give his own solutions to deal with such problems by asking people to give the numbers of the telemarketing people who call up often for credit cards and schemes. MTV will flash their numbers on screen to ask viewers to keep calling the telemarketing people.






Additionally the channel will kick off with shows like MTV Wear Their Skin, which is made for college students wherein the VJs will talk about how to get a cost effective makeover.

MTV Lovebytes, which is partly animated, will provide guidelines to viewers on how to behave on their first date. MTV Food Guide will speak about the weird food that is offered in the hostels across the country. Both these will be short opinionates.

The launch is also accompanied with the addition of a new International VJ called Mia who is an ex-Kingfisher swim suit model. She will host a show called Saturday Shuffle, a five hour program which features international hit music videos.

"We had run a promotional campaign across various cities wherein we asked people to design logos for us. We received a response of 15,000 logos as well as logo's designed by celebritees like Bobby Deol and Shah Rukh Khan", said Patil.

All these shows are interactive and viewers will be invited to share their ideas and opinions on the show as well the re-launched website mymtvindia.com.

"The website becomes user freindly with communities and blogs, thus taking forward the meassage of our tagline my MTV" added patil.


Source-indiantelevision.com