Bollywood innovates digital movie marketing ways, now games and chatbots used to engage audience

Bollywood has never shied away from trying new things especially when it comes to marketing films because the wider the reach of the movie better are the box office collections. Be it radio or television, Bollywood has innovated to leverage media to the maximum. And now it is trying its hands on digital marketing but is making efforts to go beyond likes and shares on social media.

From games to chatbots, to web series, digital marketers are thinking out of the box to promote a film. And the recent example of this is the marketing strategy of Baaghi 2 starring Tiger Shroff and Disha Patani that introduced a chatbot at the end of the film’s promo allowing people to strike a conversation with the film online.

The 2015 release Bajirao Mastani’s content strategy involved launching an animated web series called the ‘Blazing Bajirao’. It was released three months prior to the release of the film.

Gamification too has been the area of interest for digital marketers to have a swifter, wider reach. Apart from Baaghi, films like Sultan, Ra.One, Kahaani, Munna Michael, Krish, Ghajini, Brothers, Dhoom 3 have used games to engage with the viewers.

The digital marketing team of Vidya Balan-starrer Kahaani developed an online game titled ‘The Great Indian Parking Wars’, required players to park Vidya’s taxi on a street.

Other games include, a video game released for the film Brothers starring Akshay Kumar and Sidharth Malhotra called Clash of Fighters, had 3D animated life-like characters that looked similar to the heroes of the film.

Shah Rukh Khan’s Ra.One had a game sharing the film’s title which was released as the prequel to the movie. The first Indian superhero too had its own game for promotion. Aamir Khan’s Ghajini was the first Bollywood film to be made into a 3D game for PCs.

Films like Kambakkht Ishq and Love Aaj Kal too used gaming for promotions. The former had spent close to Rs 7 crore in digital marketing.

Although a film’s promotion budget is highest on television with 40-50 percent share, digital is growing significantly going up to 20-30 percent. As more and more Indians are accessing the internet, movie marketing budgets are bound to include the online platform.