TV NEW
Organisation | Aum-i Artistes
My Role | Concept, Brand Strategy, Copywriting, Account Management
How can we disrupt news programming from noise to nuance, and shape the future of factual?
In 2014, the Kerala Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) and the India Middle East Broadcasting Network approached Aum-i Artistes with a multi-fold request for proposal (RFP):
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Create a distinctive brand position for a Malayalam television news channel, TV NEW.
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Lead the messaging campaign from strategy to execution to measurement.
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Develop end-to-end creative assets and editorial frameworks.
TV NEW needed a strategy partner who could recontextualize their brand message for a highly competitive and saturated television news market flush with competitors all clamouring over each other to build share. For this new venture, KCCI asked us to develop key messaging for a brand campaign that elevated the conversation around news to a different place.
Kerala’s relationship to news.
With the omniscience of the internet and moment-to-moment consumption of information as content, the dissemination of news has undergone an inevitable transformation all over the world. Television newscasts now include amateur videos, sourced from a Facebook Live Feed or a Tweet thread, covering events like the Arab spring or the Japanese tsunami. These videos, with their shaky cameras and people's unguarded reactions, are imbued with a greater sense of immediacy than professional footage.
In the backdrop of a media-rich, newspaper-reading community like Kerala, people don't just consume news, they curate it, share it, develop it, add to it, reinterpret it — it's a very dynamic relationship. On top of that, it’s hard for an unknown, fledgling news outlet to compete with legacy news channels like Mathrubhumi News, Reporter News, Asianet, etc.
Adding to the noise is the fact that mainstream TV news in India, as in most other parts of the world, is already besieged with fake news, propaganda, and opinion pieces of dubious origin.
My first job was to create a simple positioning statement the whole workforce could passionately support and rally around, guide the behaviours and messages of the brand, and more importantly, change the way people think about news.
‘Make Good News.’
The future of news is about threaded conversations. It’s about connecting the seemingly unconnected. This idea of bringing ‘newness’ to news was the foundation of our creative strategy. TV NEW was thus positioned as an attempt to disrupt mass-consumed truthiness by empowering the viewer to consider alternate perspectives. Through initial stakeholder interviews and strategy development, we found that this sense of newness informed everything they do. TV NEW genuinely stood out in that this was a values-led news enterprise that believed as much in its product as it did in its mission.
We brought the same philosophy into our brand work. While every other news channel/platform thrived on virality at the expense of divisive content, we decided to pushback and build a new narrative, rationalised into one line: Make Good News.
'Good News' is not a coincidence; it’s a function of relentless work and commitment towards making good. The messaging speaks to news as a tool for good rather than a purveyor of provocation.
Noise to nuance.
Make Good News underlines the role of news in sustaining open democracies via debate and discussion. After all, news reflects the efforts we make as a nation. This simple expression called for three fundamental shifts in the organisation’s business culture and market positioning: from specialist news to all-format factual, from traditional broadcast to multi-platform, from noise to nuance.
A new news culture.
Working closely with TV NEW’s leadership, we took the language of ‘good news’ and really, really ran with it.
My role as a Strategist was to disrupt conventional news programming and reimagine a defiantly new news culture, where debate and discussion is closely intertwined with calls for resolution and redressal. This was the North Star that defined TV NEW: perspectives as opposed to absolute truths and oversimplifications.
So while every other news outlet claimed to be the final gatekeeper of truth or demolisher of fake news, telling us what to think, we positioned TV NEW to embrace the one thing that its competitors try to safeguard us from: multiple perspectives. It sounds counterintuitive at first, but it’s the one true thing this society actually needs. And it worked. We embraced this search for journalistic depth and highlighted it in the campaign: TV NEW doesn’t just bring you news, we bring you the bigger picture.
Editorial agenda.
Make Good News codified a clear direction for the TV NEW team; what the brand should stand for, who it needs to speak to and how. It made TV NEW’s editorial agenda clear and simple for commissioning teams — if a programme idea didn’t align with making good, TV NEW didn’t do it. Most of all, it rallied the people who worked for TV NEW to feel proud of the contribution they were making to shape the public discourse.
On the design front, a layout and presentation that cuts through newsy tropes was priority. Combining hand-drawn illustrations with actual news footage aligned perfectly with TV NEW’s promise to disrupt absolutism with multiple points of view. This creative brief resulted in a multi-channel brand campaign leading up to TV NEW’s official launch at the Mission Kerala Summit 2014 (September 2).
Presented in both long-form and short-form variations, the narratives captured the cadence of how news is intertwined with the public consciousness.
Interest targeting.
We also used interest targeting to further segment the audience by their related passions, like travel, education, gaming, business, wellness, etc. For us, that meant driving B2B desire with OOH units at landmark commercial hotspots as well as generating B2C brand awareness with print, radio, TV and OOH placements in high-traffic areas for the target daily-commute demographic of working 25-to-44 year olds (helping land the personality of the TV NEW brand with a tech-native audience who are looking for more than vacuous clickbait and hate mongering from their news consumption).
Lastly, as part of my Account Management responsbilties, I also worked with THE design team at Aum-i Artistes and TV NEW’s regional market managers to build out concepts and execute a roll-out plan that delivered the elements of our campaign story across TV NEW’s media mix, ranging from digital and OOH to print, TV and radio spots.
Although I’m unable to share all of the work due to confidentiality, I’m very proud of the partnership.
Impact.
The messaging was both engaging and informative, and the results* were impressive: increased brand awareness (+28%) and a lift in lower-funnel metrics like intent to watch (+15%), especially among TV NEW’s target demographic, aged 25 to 44.
*Survey conducted from September 15 to December 15, 2014. Sample of 9K+ respondents age 21+ who follow daily news. Success was measured in percentage points (pts) by comparing a group of viewers who were exposed to the campaign, against a control group who were not.